You can know someone so well, be able to understand all their private jokes and subtle expressions. You can know why they dislike eggs and adore blue icing. You can know all this and still be a stranger to them.
She came home. And she was whole. Whole in body. Her life has gone on and our family is reunited. Of sorts.
She has a life and I sense I am not completely a part of it. She has a whole year of which she never speaks. Never the slightest allusion to it. Oh, once in a very great while when she is overtired or enjoys a bit too much champagne on New Years do you see a brief shadow. The moment at her wedding that remembered the fallen.
Within that shadow is an immense cavern. I can only guess what lies within. Yes, the events of that year are well chronicled. The destruction, death, doubts, and fear. All well prepared for history to study and students to dread taking examinations of in the years to come.
I would like to think she doesn't see my own shadow. She does not know the nights I laid awake, feeling like the worst has happened. Those nights when I let the darkness of the night overtake my heart. I do not speak of those fears or those long dark nights. I do not tell her I played a million scenarios of how I would find our parents. I do not tell her of how I would end up crying myself to sleep because I could not imagine having to tell our mother that her daughter was dead.
There is little I can do to protect my sister; I am the first to admit she is so very capable of caring for herself. But I will do this, she will never know of these hauntings. She will not know of my shadows.
Knowing the facts is so very different than knowing there is infinitely more to tell. Knowing that those tales will never be told.
I can see it when she sits with her friends, those who were there. Moments come, innocuous days to the rest of the world. Moments come when they suddenly will still. One eye catches another's and their conversation stops. What that moment remembers, what that eye is reliving, I will never know.
But we move on.
She has a life and it is the sort of life an older sister wishes for her sister. A happy relationship, a productive career, caring friends, and the peace that is most profoundly deserved.
As time moves on, those who were never in the confusion of battle, never saw the lights nor smelled the fear, forget. They forget that there are scars that are not seen yet never heal. There are lives that while not lost, are never the same. They forget that these people, then barely more than children, gave all they had to do good. And these children did not return with all that they gave. They left behind innocence and childhood. They became heroes. But it is so easy to call someone a hero; it dismisses their humanity. For a hero is larger than life. My sister became a news story. Then a subject for books. Now she can walk the street without notice. That is a blessing, but it is also a curse. For my sister and all those who survived, they still ache, still mourn, still deserve and require our compassion and honor.
While I now am back home, it is not a home that I nor my sister remember from our childhood. Rather, perhaps that home does not remember us. We are different now. We are changed. It is the nature of these times.
Now while I write in anonymity, it is with a resolve that somehow the words, the actions, the life I live will somehow make things just a bit better. Make it a bit more possible that two sisters may not have to be separated by desperation, war, and the shadow of what will never be told.