Frangibility

The folks at the home decor place must think I cry over everything. 

I don’t blame them for gaping, blushing at their rudeness, and hastily looking away. The way a peach sofa with don’t touch me became more appealing to them than the crimson glow pinching into my cheeks. 

I don’t blame them. But I still think there’s something tearful about a nail-biting, sweating-despite-the-air-con saleslady as the manager barks at her. A newbie, by the looks of her fresh uniform and fidgety eyes swallowing the place whole—from its million-dollar paintings to porcelain windows worth twice her apartment’s rent. 

Her eyes only stop to linger at her boss’ as he explains with a bull-like glower the consequences of breaking an item or watching someone do so while permitting their escape. Every threat would be empty without citing an example, so he recounts how the girl before her was fired when a customer broke a drawer handle and wasn’t caught during her shift.

“Negligence, he growls, “is a disease. Just a handle and she couldn’t pay for it. Didn’t show up to work the next day, the girl before you. Didn’t answer any o’ her phones, and long story short, we found out she‌ ran away. Another city. For just for a door handle. Can you believe it??” 

He’s looking for a rush of agreement in her face but finds none. “I won’t be like that,” she promises hurriedly, but what she means is, I have nowhere to run. 

Like a seer, I see where this is going: before long, she’ll tiptoe around her customers, grow desperate under their moderate voices—as if her footsteps and their talking could shatter glass. She would get to know the name, appearance, and item number of every piece available; she would recite it by heart until she thinks knowing enough will keep them from breaking. 

At night, she’ll be brushing her teeth before paranoia hits like a tidal wave. Did Customer X look shady when he said he’d pay in cash? Did I twist the key twice when locking the door to make it extra secure? After verifying the answers, she’ll go to bed exhausted, dream about having her own place, and wake up to fifteen, twenty missed calls—the store was robbed. 

The store was robbed.

Like one thunderclap and that’s all it takes to summon brown-outs, everything in her life shutting down. She knows the names and details of every item to the point of affection—if that’s possible for nonliving things—affection that now has nowhere to go. It’s grief, for herself and every item she looked out for like a mother hen, keeping her eggs from cracking, but she can’t prevent every accident. 

And maybe I have an insufferable tendency to assume the worst before it’s happened, for strangers I have yet to know, but who can blame me? The past few years have stirred alive, transforming from memory to instinct to hyper-imagination. 

The ripples pool in the new saleslady’s quivering eyes as a reflection of my own, five years ago, but instead of a high-end store I was in another place that extracted money like the amount was needed for stopping a war. I remember it vividly, the same way I imagine something in the future, except with more of a tired nervousness. An expired one. 

Once, I kept a journal to record every medicine feeding time, when my brother needed me to coerce him into drinking. It would last an hour, sometimes an hour and a half. I say “he needed me” because he knew damn well what the disgusting things I was forcing him to ingest contained, but it was the forcing—the soothing, the sobbing, the sinking feeling of surrender—that eventually drained down the herbal soup.

I clutched the journal like I knew how to scribble prescriptions, as I listened to the hum of pen clicks and papers shuffling, as doctors discussed urgently with my parents, as my parents used the same tone to warn me of misbehaving. Define misbehaving: not spending time with him enough, not leaving him alone enough. 

“Play with him, but not roughly. If that oxygen tube disconnects, your brother dies, and,” my parents said, pausing for dramatic effect, “we’ll ground you for two weeks.” 

It’s the same way the manager tells the new girl, “Be careful with the lamps; they’re $5000 each. Break them, you pay, and—” the pause for dramatic effect—“it leaves a permanent stain on your record.”

The menacing pause is the stupidest thing ever, but that’s another thing about threats: the payment—the loss—may be punishment enough, but you must still endanger more than necessary. You must make us want to cower and cover our ears. 

Once, I meticulously mapped out the route to my brother’s bedside amidst a labyrinth of beeping machines and fragile cords that, if mishandled, could halt his breathing. I traced my finger over the faint dust on each buzzing piece of equipment and every solemn drug bottle, committing to memory their distinct functions, precise administration schedules, and the level of doom each item represents.

At night, I comforted Mom when Dad “couldn't take the pressure” and took off to a bar. She warned me about men that leave and how one day, I must leave too. She told me stories about daughters before me that leave, and I said, puppy-eyed, “I won’t be like that.” Maybe what I meant all along is I have nowhere to go. 

How could I? Hospitals were my world, my brother's well-being my sole focus, his smile a beacon that merged all the maps in existence into one — grounding me amidst the chaos. It's in those sterile rooms where our resemblance is most striking, not only in appearance but like the sameness of hospital rooms, regardless of the occasion or circumstance.

Maybe they all feel identical because of the dread-filled air that halves each time, that diminishes with each passing day, only to return like a collective sigh of relief when the doctor announces he might go home tomorrow. Then, the dread air regrows, filling every corner as another visit looms—akin to a single cell dividing into two, like identical twins, each incomplete without the other until they both regain full stature, if life's cycle allows. If the hospital can accommodate another stay before this rhythm breaks - before his heart falters from incessant pounding.

I think that’s the metaphor I meant when I called Mom at 4:13 am last week, ears drumming with wasted heartbeats, hunched over a toilet bowl and repeating, repeating, repeating, “the hospital rooms are like us, him and me. We’re so alike, not exactly identical, but I got to go home, and he didn’t. Mom. Are you still there? He didn’t go home. He didn’t. He–”

I grew up wishing I could say my sole hospital experience had been my birth, but time alters our desires. A few years ago, amidst its hushed air and lingering scents, I found myself yearning that my numerous visits had been for my own health. That they had been about me.

Now, I have a new wish: that I can stop assuming everything ends with breaking. In the end, I resemble less my twin brother and more the fragments of shattered pill bottles he left behind. In the end, I'm a disheveled figure, clown-nosed and aimlessly window-shopping in a posh home décor store at the town's pinnacle, for no apparent reason other than it being the least likely place to encounter someone I know giving me sympathetic glances. It's the “I'm so sorry for your loss,” but ultimately never the “I'm sorry you got grounded for two weeks.”

The new saleswoman casts me a quizzical glance, almost expectantly, and it dawns on me that her superior has long departed, and I’m the one who hasn’t looked away from them. Who hasn’t existed my reverie of past regrets and future uncertainties. It’s time I get out of this place before something breaks.