When I first moved to Washington State it was the beginning of summer. We packed up all of our belongings into a long, yellow Penske truck, Genevieve and I packed my beta fish, three of our four cats into cat crates (one of our cats road with Rowen in the moving truck), and we drove over 2,000 miles from Mesa, Arizona to Puyallup, Washington. This was the longest drive of my life. By this point at the ripe age of 16 I'd become a chainsmoker, my cigarette of choice being Marlboro Red’s. I wasn’t aware that Genevieve or Rowen knew about it so it was a sincerely painful two-day drive through California without being able to sneak a cigarette.

Genevieve and I didn’t talk much of the way, as I was devastated that Ophelia wasn’t allowed to move with us on our new family adventure. If anyone could use saving from the Arizona heat and influences, it was Ophelia. Ophelia had recently moved out with Vladimir and some roommates near the Fiesta Mall in Mesa. This was close by where she worked and Mesa Community College where she'd received a full ride scholarship to further her education.

Ophelia had always been a little bit of a kleptomaniac. starting around the age of 13 she'd gotten caught shoplifting at least once a year until she hit 17 years of age. First it was Wal-Mart then places in the mall, but it only seemed par for the course on the never-ending merry-go-round of drama and crisis that had become our lives. I mean, if she wasn't refusing to eat, stealing cars, hiding someone in the downstairs storage closet, or tyring to comit suicide, she was most likely shoplifting or breaking and entering into abandoned buidings. Either she got smarter about how to steal or she stopped until she moved out of our house; knowing Ophelia though, I'm pretty sure it was the former.

One day we got a knock on the door at the apartment, a few months before Genevieve received the news that her office would be closing and she'd be out of a job; the job she'd worked at for 28 years. A groggy and alreay angry Rowen answered the door to a police officer, who was asking about Ophelias’ whereabouts. Rowen provided him with Ophelias' new address and the man headed over to her apartment to charge her with identity theft.

That’s right, Ophelia was racking up quite the list of life experiences: obsessive compulsive disorder, anorexia nervosa, self mutilation and suicidal tendencies, anxiety disorders, depression, kleptomania, and now felony theft. The sad part is that I have no doubts in my mind the idea was entirely Vladimir’s; I told you he was a bad apple. He was like a real life version of Ed, Edd, and Eddy all rolled into one con artist of a human being. Vladimir always had a way to get out of doing any form of real work and was consistently thinking of ways to scam people out of their money. All of the evidence points to one person and an easily manipulated girl.

We'd later learn what had transpired is that Ophelia had stolen credit cards from people that frequented her place of business because Vladimir spent most of their money on drugs. They used the money they stole for whatever Vladimir wanted or needed at the time, according to Ophelia mostly fast food or going out on adventures. Ophelia began to develop a guilty conscience and returned the card to one of the regulars after having spent around 200-some-dollars of their money. Instead of being thrilled that Ophelia might have simply “found the card” the individual saw through her falsehoods and filed charges against her.

Consequently, Genevieve spent her hard earned money on a lawyer to help Ophelia avoid being charged with felony theft but all to no avail because of her previous history of kleptomania (it was pretty long). As much as I love Ophelia, she was such a hopless romantic and that screwed her over. She refused to roll over on her worthless boyfriend who had been placed in prison for possession of marijuana and instead took all of the blame on herself. The judge threw the book at her to teach her a iesson. The last time she'd been caught shoplifting, they'd warned her she wouldn’t get off so lucky in the future, and they meant it. Perhaps she should've heeded their warning.

I wasn't allowed to go to her trial because in true fashion, I was to be "shielded" from the madness. But what my parents didn't understand was that there was no shielding me from anyhing. Present in the courtroom or not, I was living this life alongside them, along for the ride if you will. Geneviee has recounted to me the many times that she sat in tears watching her oldest daughter be charged with a felony, crying uncontrollably in the front row of the courtroom. The judge at one point during Ophelias’ outbursts about her "unfair treatment" cited our mother as an example of Ophelias’ shame,

“Look at your mother, do you think this is fun for her? Look at her weep for you. She is weeping for your future. Do you see what this is doing to your mother?”

What the judge should've said was look at what this has done to your family. Yet Ophelia remained unsatisfied with the courts decision. In her mind, despite being close to the age of adulthood, she was just a mixed up kid. Nothing was really her fault, it was all just poor circumstances. From my perspective at least she was only being charged with a felony and given a certain number of hours of community service. She could've been thrown into women’s prison for what she'd done but instead she felt she'd received a raw deal. I just couldn’t wrap my brain around how she thought that the law had mistreated her in any way, shape or form.

Since Vladimir was in jail she was forced to move back home with us, attend regular probation meetings where she'd be drug tested, and finish her community service. The entire experience was tearing Genevieve apart at the seams. While Ophelia stayed on the straight and narrow for a while it was clear that she was waiting for Vladimir to get out of prison. Ophelia wrote him letters and fully intended to rekindle their relationship when he got of jail. I mean, why shouldn’t she? She'd protected him and prevented him for receiving a much harsher sentence. Considering he'd been to juvenile detention many a time in his life and shown no signs of improving his deviency, he would've received a much harsher sentence for felony theft. However, things didn't play out in real life as they had in Ophelias’ mind.

When Vladimir made it out of jail he rekindled his relationship with his former call girl mother, a now born again Christian, and was living somewhere in Phoenix. One of the stipulations of his residence with his mom was that he wasn't to see Ophelia anymore. The stress of not being able to rekindle her relationship with Vladmir sent Ophelia off the rails. She was now using meth with more frequency, but at least this time she didn’t publicize it by smoking it in front of me. I'd often wake up in the middle of the night only to see Ophelias’ laptop light or a book light reflecting off of the stucco wall nearest our bunk beds. I’d pry and ask what she was doing but the answer was always “Nothing. Just go back to bed.”

One day she finally divulged to me that she was spending her free time installing spying software onto her computer and stalking Vladimir to see what he was up to. Obviously, I told her that she needed to tone it down but I also tried to comfort her and let her know that she wasn’t totally off of her rocker. Vladimir was currently working at an apartment complex as a maintenance man and she'd become obsessed. She needed to know where Vladimir was, who he was sleeping with, and who his friends were at all times.

I mean, realistically, why wouldn’t she be obsessed with what he was doing? This person had ruined her life and here he was making a fresh start for himself like nothing had happened at all! Sleeping with other girls left and right like she meant nothing to him. All while Ophelia lost the right to vote or move out of the state for 5 years or more. She'd never be allowed to travel outside of the country either, not even to Mexico or Canda. Did Ophelia mean anything to him? Had she simply wasted the past 5 years of her life on this loser?

No, Ophelia wasn't about to have wasted her time. Ophelia wasn't about to just fade into the distance without a fight. If she was going down then so was he, down to the depths of hell where he belonged. I knew that she was slowly creeping ever past the point of no return, so I tried to subtly mention her drug use to Genevieve. Our mother wouldn’t believe it though, much like she was in denial about the cutting whenever I'd bring it up. So the crazy express train pulled out of the station with Ophelia onboard. I was at home that summer when the phone rang. I lifted the receiver and knew it couldn't be good, so I took a deep breath and prepared for the bad news,

“Hello?”

It was Genevieve and while her voice sounded blank and distant, I could tell she'd just recently regained her composure from crying.

“Roslyn, I need you to wake your dad up for me. Let him know that your sister is on her way to Good Samaritan Hospital. You need to meet her there”, she said somberly.

Something wasn’t right about the way she said this. So many times I'd heard these words or words similar to them but the intonation in Genevieve's voice implied that this time was different.

“Is everything okay? Are you coming to meet us? What happened? What room is…” I began to fire off questions but she cut me off.

“I’ll be there. Just wake up your dad.”

That was the last thing I heard her say before the dial tone was ringing in my ears.

I woke Rowen up, despite the fact that it was nearly 3pm, he doesn't handle depression well. When we arrived at the hospital Genevieve was standing in the hallway talking to a doctor outside a set of curtains. Rowen came to stand beside her; no warm embraces for our family, just time to get down to the brass tax. I fluidly moved past the doctor, Genevieve and Rowen, then slid behind the curtain to see Ophelia. She was wide-awake, a shock considering she'd seen better days. Her left wrist was being stitched and stapled by a nurse or an intern manning the pit.

“Hey, Ophelia.” I greeted her with a half-smile just glad that she was still alive.

“Hey, kiddo.” she replied.

“How you doing?” I asked trying to hold back the tears in my eyes.

The gash was so deep they were going for stitches and staples, which isn't something they generally do. I'd know, I've watched her get stitched up what felt like a million times since I was 8 years old. I could tell that she'd narrowly done it this time. There was dried blood all over her. It was on her shirt, pants, shoes, even her face. Jesus Christ, diid they even try to clean her up?

I wanted to ask what happened but that just isn’t our family’s way. Plus I doubt she wanted to talk about yet another failed suicide attempt.

“I’m okay. How about you", she responded in kind.

“I’m all right. Looks like you’ve seen better days though.”

“Yeah, I have.” she said with a fake smile.

This was the extent of our conversation and then we sat in silence. This was who we were, who we'd become. We weren't people that shared our feelings about tragedy, not with each other and certainly not with anyone else. Hell, we weren't physically capable of processing our feelings anymore. We'd become experts at numbing ourselves from the realities around us just to make it through the day. We were all dry eyed and focused on the goal, getting past this event.

The most screwed up part about it was this was a completely normal transaction at the time for us, but what we weren't acknowledging was all of the pain and anger that we all felt. Every single one of us felt like it would never end. It's like our lives were stuck on a loop. One song on repeat that just plays over and over until finally you don't even hear it anymore, not the way you used to anyways. But they say things have to get worse before they get better, maybe this was the worst, right? Maybe if we made it through this last round, we'd come out unscathed on the other side?

We sat in silence, and I grabbed Ophelia's free hand, while the intern finished her work by bandaging Ophelias’ left wrist up with some white coban wrapping. The intern then did the poilte thing and left the room. Looking back I'm irritated to think that this random person is plastered in my memories, but the truth is that I hardly noticed her presence at the time. I’m also sure that our touching moment as sisters’ while not lost on this individual likely made them uncomfortable and sad for our clearly dysfunctional family. Even from a bystander’s point of view it must've been clear that this wasn't Ophelia and I’s first rodeo and neither our first or last brush with death.

Once we arrived at home our parents asked us politely to go to our room. This wasn't something we'd ever really been asked to do more than a handful of times and certainly never in a polite manner. Everything in our house was stated as a demand or an order, never a request by any means. As a family, we never used our quiet inside voices either, so the fact that the instruction wasn't given at its’ highest octave was unnerving. This could only mean one thing, the parental units were going to have a serious discussion and we were to be the subjects of said discussion.

We closed the door to our room. I kicked off my shoes, hopped onto the top bunk, which I hadn't used since Ophelia had moved out, and stared at my poster of Johnny Depp on our ceiling. Ophelia did the same and lay on the bottom bunk staring lifelessly up at the slats above her that held me securely in place. We sat in silence for a little while until I chose to breach it,

“What happened today, Ophelia?”

“I just lost it… I bought a package of box razors and I went out to that damn apartment complex to try and talk to him. He wouldn’t talk to me though so I waited a while… I called the police and I told them that he was on probation and I knew that he was high and had weed on him. I also told them that I was going to kill him, then I hung up. He went into an apartment and when he came out I was in his golf cart. It turns out I didn’t need my razors because there was a box knife already there. He started to walk towards me and I slit my wrist with the box razor. I knew it was too deep, deeper than normal. I knew I was going to lose conciousness soon, so when he tried to help me I tried to slit his throat. I didn’t get a chance though, the cops showed up and brought the ambulance with them.” She said it with a straight face and no fluctuation in her tone of voice, almost like a robot.

It didn’t seem real. It didn't seem like this could've happened since she was describing it so nonchalantly. I knew that she was capable of it though and clearly her left wrist was evidence of that. I leaned over the edge of the top bunk,

“Why didn’t you just come home”, I pleaded.

“He had to pay for what he’d done. He just couldn’t get away with it… And I just wanted it to all be over already”, she replied in that same monotone.

“Where’s Vladimir now?” I asked.

“They took him to prison because he violated his probation terms.” she said rolling over onto her side so we didn’t have to make eye contact. I’m not sure if she didn’t want to speak to me anymore or just wanted to fall asleep and pretend that today had just been a bad nightmare.

I was furious with her, with Vladimir, with my parents. I blamed everyone. How could we all be so incredibly blind? She'd always been crying out for help and we just didn’t know how to save her. The obsessive behaviors, the anorexia, the stealing, the cutting; all of it had added up to our inequities. Living with Ophelia was like being on the Titanic, there just weren't enough lifeboats to save everyone. So here we all were floating around in the ocean just waiting for the hypothermia to set in.

I walked out into the living room to hear my parents arguing in a rather hush hush manner.

“What the fuck is wrong with you people??!!!” I screamed at them.

They looked up at me in surprise. They knew I cussed and while I was never easy to control, I certainly wasn't the child that was prone to outbursts. I'd also never voiced how I felt about anything that had transpired in our lives until today. Since before the cutting, I'd never told them how much I hated them. How angry I was for feeling so unloved, for having no one to talk to about what we'd all been going through. I never said a damn thing about it, and i just couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't be so angry all of the time anymore! I couldn't live like this anymore! I felt like I'd lived my entire life holding my breath and I finally had to come up for air.

“Watch your tone with us!”, Rowen dad hissed.

“Why? You’re so fucking oblivious! I told you months ago that she was on meth but no one wanted to hear it!” the rage was taking over and I couldn't stop now. It just felt so good to spread all of that negativity around and get it out.

“God dammit, Genevieve! I told you!!!”, Rowen immeditately turned on our mother. it's easy to point the finger at someone and somehow she always lucked out and got to be his scapegoat.

“She stays up all hours of the night! She’s completely paranoid! She won’t eat! Won’t sleep! She’s angry all of the time! All you had to do was ask me for Christ’s sake, I live in the same room with her!!!!” I bellowed out at the top of my lungs.

“We’ll just have to send her to rehab.” , Rowen said shaking her head.

“Do you have any idea how much rehab costs? More to the point you can’t make someone go to rehab! Rehab will never work if she doesn’t want it too!”, I screamed back.

I just couldn't sulk and brood silently anymore. i kept waiting for these to chuckleheads to belly up the bar and be parent, but it was clear they didn't know how. How was I somehow the most logical person in this house? I kept thinking, "I'm only 16! How am Ithe only one who has a clue what’s going on with anyone? How is that no one here has a clue what’s going on with either of us???!!!!!" I had to get out of there before I said something that I meant but would surely regret. I'd been fighting to bottle up this rage my whole life and I couldn’t let it all out. I had to be strong for everyone else’s sake, if not for my own. I was stumbling around the house trying to find my ipod and my earphones. Attempting to make it down the steps and into the foyer before anyone said something stupid that would make my blood boil, but I didn't make it in time.

“We need to pull together and be a family now”, Genevieve said.

I'd made it to the bottom of the stairs and my hand was on the brass knob. Just as I was about to turn it I heard Rowen say,

“She’s right, Roslyn.”

I knew what I wanted to say would hurt like hell but I couldn’t stop myself. They'd finally let demon out of it's cage and I'd been dying to address the real issue for years,

“Yeah, since when have we ever been a family? We’re just a bunch of people that live in the same house.” I said in mixture of desperation and frustration.

With that I turned the knob and left the house. I didn’t make it around the corner before I started to cry uncontrollably, but by the time I'd reached the canal I'd shoved it all down. I couldn’t cry about these things anymore, instead I just had let it fester into anger. Anger is an easier emotion to deal with than despair. Whoever said that it has to get worse before it gets better never met my family. We just kept spiraling downwards past worse to the worst. Hadn’t we reached an all time low yet?

These are the memories I had to reminisce on while we drove through California. I was angry that my whole life had been uprooted at the age of 16. All of my friends were in a completely different state and I'd begun to realize that we would likely never speak to each other again. There went my chance to reunite with Sebastian. Little did I know that I was about to be thrust into an entirely new subculture. Ophelia was going to be 2,000 plus miles away and I'd never thought I could feel so alone. Genevieve turned to me as I sat in the passenger seat, steeped in my silence, looking out at the blur of vineyards shooting past us on the side of the highway.

“I know you smoke. So just have a cigarette and talk to me already.”

She was right, so I picked up a cigarette, stuck it in between my rosy pink lips and lit it. We laughed for a second and then our car ride slid back into silence.

Two days ago we drove away from Ophelia, who had no place to stay becaue she couldn't move with us because of her felony conviction. I thought the worst of it was over, but now that I'd started to let myself feel all of that pent up anger and frustration, the hard part was just about to begin.

I'd moved out of childhood and into adolesence with no support system, carrying luggage labeled, "EMOTIONALLY DAMAGED". Unburying and accepting those emotions was going to be a lifelong journey, but I didn't know that just yet. For now, I was smoking a cigarette in the car, headed towards a town I didn't want to live in. The struggle was just beginning.