I forgot I had a blog

It's true: I forgot I had a blog.

It’s an easy thing to forget about. You wake up one day, log in to your account, and a whole year has gone by. Sometimes you wake up, a whole year has gone by and you’re still wearing the same jeans. Things like this happen.

In honor of forgetting all about my blog, I’ve decided to post an essay of mine with pictures. Who doesn’t like pictures in their essays? Certainly not me.

Here you have it.

 ***

Why the h*ll did I hate my sister so g*d d*mn much when I was 10?  

A thorough investigation into my 1987 diary

From the outside cover you can tell the thing has been through it all. Great loves, great losses, great fears. The golden metal lock, imprinted with the words Made in Italy (seriously do you remember there was a time not all things were made in China?), has been pried open a million times over. The key is long gone.  The tear in the cover has been affixed with black electrical tape. The sides of the diary read “Don’t Open” and in between are sketches of tiny red and black hearts.

This, folks, is my 1987 diary.

Welcome to my 10 year-old mind: a complex creature filled with anxiety and angst translating into often-misspelled curse words shot off in rapid fire. My 12 year-old sister, Jessica, was almost always the target.

Exhibit A) February 13, 1987, the hate begins

The entry reads:

Jessica was being a fuckin-bitch, asshole, and an apbsoulute Fucker!!!

I warned you that my spelling wasn’t that good.

I’m not exactly sure what my sister did to warrant my first tirade.  Jessica and I had shared a room together at this point since we were toddlers. Maybe I had finally lost it? Maybe I borrowed her plaid stirrup pants and she’d gotten angry with me? Or maybe she had kept me up the night before talking to her boyfriend on the phone under her covers. It could have been any (or all) of those things. One thing was for sure, I was mad enough to use three (!!!) exclamation marks.

 Exhibit B) March 3, 1987, the hate continues (and I go to Girl Scouts)

 The entry reads:

Jessica was an asshole. I had to go to girl sckouts. It was okay.

By March, my sister Jessica had apparently stopped being a “fuckin-bitch,” but had turned into an “asshole.” At least I knew to vary my choice of swear words. Again, I don’t go into specifics about why I was so angry. Maybe this was the day when Jessica told me to start shaving my legs because they looked like ape legs?

 Exhibit C) April 13, 1987, Jessica gets perverted

The entry reads:

Today Jess is being an asshole. AND A FUCKIN’ PERVERT!

First off, I’m not sure I even knew what a pervert was. I knew it had something to do with sexy, but I wasn’t exactly sure what sex was, so I had no right calling her a pervert. Secondly, I used her nickname “Jess,” so I couldn’t have been that angry, though a year or two earlier she had drawn cartoons of naked people, cut them into small pieces, and hid them in a metal tin. Man, I wish I could find that tin.  

Exhibit D) April 15, 1987, I realize I actually LOVE my sister

The entry reads:

Julie Figura said that Jessica almost got ejected [meaning: injected] by drugs. I’m scared! It was a kid at her school. I don’t know who to tell.

I remember walking down the hall of my middle school when I overheard Julie telling someone else this story. At the mention of my sister’s name I made her tell me everything. Of course my sister wasn’t almost “ejected” with drugs, but she was almost “injected” with something. Now that I think about it, this could have been someone’s insulin pen and not something serious like heroin. Though it was the 80s and there were a lot of drugs around. I ran straight to the guidance counselor’s office and bawled my eyes out. He told me to tell him what I knew and to try to calm down. I didn’t know what I knew, but as it turned out, I knew I loved my sister.

May 4, 2013 - 25 years later

Jessica is married with two children, my nephews Andrew (20) and Mark (15). We are in the process of grieving for our mother who passed away in December 2012 of colon cancer. Jessica was my mother’s caretaker during her last months. Jessica and I talk every day. I’m married now, too, and I still swear too much, though it’s no longer directed at my sister.