"Argyria" by Dedeepya Guthikonda
I meet my sister at a Pakistani place in a bad part of the city that would get my parents pissed if they knew. They think Sana’s in Pittsburgh majoring in pre-med right now, not at some skanky, fluorescent-lighted Asian fast-food chain in New York. But Sana hadn’t bothered to tell me either. She’d only posted something at a bakery in Soho, the kind that’s made its debut on a Food Network TV show. It’s expensive and classy and fits her taste. She’s the kind of girl that likes to be in bigger places.
Before she enters the restaurant and the bells strung above the door for good fortune ring, I think about the last time I saw my sister. It was at our parent’s house in Mason, Ohio. Her fresh piercings and a tattoo wrapped around her left shoulder had prompted them to ask her what she was doing with her life and shouldn’t she be more careful and not everything is as easy as it seems. She stopped visiting after that.
Mason’s the kind of place where people like to do a whole lot of talking and not much of anything else. It’s sticky—like honey—and will wrap itself all over you if you let it. Sana left before it could.
My sister is someone I think I know; she’s the kind of person who’s made me wonder what it means to really know someone. When we were younger, Sana’s hair would run down her back: thick and heavy and stubborn, frizzed up from the summer heat, and I’d sit there with the largest drugstore brush we could find, spending hours on end with those knots. It never did work, though. I’ve never been able to untangle Sana.
Sana looks like the kind of girl on magazine covers, who everyone will melt and mold into in a thousand years or so. She has honey-blonde skin the aunts in India praise my mother for, asking what she ate during her pregnancy as if my mother stirred beauty into her womb for nine months. In India, she’s called the American girl; she’s unheard of, at the time, born in a place where everything glints white as they see on the screens. They flaunt over her, asking for secrets and sorrows they think my sister will spill. They think there are corners to turn and doors to open inside of her, think Sana can scale towers with her dimensions.
I wasn’t born in America like Sana was. I’d only arrived with my parents to a country that was more foreign to them than they would have liked, and I didn’t have enough figured out to do any differently than what my religiously middle-class immigrant parents taught me to.
I was the girl the other kids stayed away from.
Mason had clung to me. It had run underneath the soles of my feet and over the loose strands of my hair until I’d become the portrait of a child for my parents. They saw the colors I brushed across my skin and nothing else. I crawled inside cardboard boxes and duct-taped flaps shut. I spent years rolling letters off my tongue, hoping for something to stick. I flailed silently in open air: unnoticed and unheard.
Sana did as she pleased. She slipped and slid through doors and windows for most of her life, the same way English rolled off her tongue, easily. By the time I was twenty-one and ready to leave Mason, Sana had already left.
She orders food that’s greasy and smells like the fake flavoring my mother refuses to cook with. It’s similar to my mother’s food in the sense that they both carry warmth and spices and a false sense of home, because what is home, really? Is home the place your cousins pity your dark skin, or the place where you want to shout look to the schoolkids when you smear black marker on your skin just as they do? Is home a one-story your parents let go of their youth and dreams for, and now spend long, empty days wondering if it will ever be worth it?
Sometimes, as I lay in bed, I drown myself with wool and silk and wonder if I will ever be home.
Sana tells me she’s staying in an apartment down the street with a girl she found off Craigslist who agreed to put off the first month’s rent. She tells me it gives her time to figure things out. I don’t ask her about Pittsburgh or college. I don’t ask her what sorts of things she needs to figure out.
My sister has been given everything, but I want to forget. I want to forget about Sana and all her dimensions. I want to forget about my parents and their one-story in sticky, hopeless Mason. I want to listen to a song they don’t call music: just hollow, empty space floating between your ears.
Instead, I tell Sana I have six months to live.
I didn’t plan to tell Sana this way. I would be lying if I said I planned to tell her at all.
I don’t know what it is, but sitting in this cheap set-up in a part of New York I was taught to avoid, surrounded by food that’s supposed to remind me of home, I’m reminded my sister is more fearless than I’ll ever be.
I haven’t told anyone, I say. I have no one to tell.
My parents are immigrants. They believe you can earn anything you work for. My parents will spend months circling doctors and medicines that will not work. They won’t understand that disease was never meant to be a part of the American dream.
Argyria, I say. I show her a part of my wrist that is already turning grey, like the rest of my body will soon be. My skin is fading away, along with the rest of me, and my sister is here to watch.
Before she enters the restaurant and the bells strung above the door for good fortune ring, I think about the last time I saw my sister. It was at our parent’s house in Mason, Ohio. Her fresh piercings and a tattoo wrapped around her left shoulder had prompted them to ask her what she was doing with her life and shouldn’t she be more careful and not everything is as easy as it seems. She stopped visiting after that.
Mason’s the kind of place where people like to do a whole lot of talking and not much of anything else. It’s sticky—like honey—and will wrap itself all over you if you let it. Sana left before it could.
My sister is someone I think I know; she’s the kind of person who’s made me wonder what it means to really know someone. When we were younger, Sana’s hair would run down her back: thick and heavy and stubborn, frizzed up from the summer heat, and I’d sit there with the largest drugstore brush we could find, spending hours on end with those knots. It never did work, though. I’ve never been able to untangle Sana.
Sana looks like the kind of girl on magazine covers, who everyone will melt and mold into in a thousand years or so. She has honey-blonde skin the aunts in India praise my mother for, asking what she ate during her pregnancy as if my mother stirred beauty into her womb for nine months. In India, she’s called the American girl; she’s unheard of, at the time, born in a place where everything glints white as they see on the screens. They flaunt over her, asking for secrets and sorrows they think my sister will spill. They think there are corners to turn and doors to open inside of her, think Sana can scale towers with her dimensions.
I wasn’t born in America like Sana was. I’d only arrived with my parents to a country that was more foreign to them than they would have liked, and I didn’t have enough figured out to do any differently than what my religiously middle-class immigrant parents taught me to.
I was the girl the other kids stayed away from.
Mason had clung to me. It had run underneath the soles of my feet and over the loose strands of my hair until I’d become the portrait of a child for my parents. They saw the colors I brushed across my skin and nothing else. I crawled inside cardboard boxes and duct-taped flaps shut. I spent years rolling letters off my tongue, hoping for something to stick. I flailed silently in open air: unnoticed and unheard.
Sana did as she pleased. She slipped and slid through doors and windows for most of her life, the same way English rolled off her tongue, easily. By the time I was twenty-one and ready to leave Mason, Sana had already left.
She orders food that’s greasy and smells like the fake flavoring my mother refuses to cook with. It’s similar to my mother’s food in the sense that they both carry warmth and spices and a false sense of home, because what is home, really? Is home the place your cousins pity your dark skin, or the place where you want to shout look to the schoolkids when you smear black marker on your skin just as they do? Is home a one-story your parents let go of their youth and dreams for, and now spend long, empty days wondering if it will ever be worth it?
Sometimes, as I lay in bed, I drown myself with wool and silk and wonder if I will ever be home.
Sana tells me she’s staying in an apartment down the street with a girl she found off Craigslist who agreed to put off the first month’s rent. She tells me it gives her time to figure things out. I don’t ask her about Pittsburgh or college. I don’t ask her what sorts of things she needs to figure out.
My sister has been given everything, but I want to forget. I want to forget about Sana and all her dimensions. I want to forget about my parents and their one-story in sticky, hopeless Mason. I want to listen to a song they don’t call music: just hollow, empty space floating between your ears.
Instead, I tell Sana I have six months to live.
I didn’t plan to tell Sana this way. I would be lying if I said I planned to tell her at all.
I don’t know what it is, but sitting in this cheap set-up in a part of New York I was taught to avoid, surrounded by food that’s supposed to remind me of home, I’m reminded my sister is more fearless than I’ll ever be.
I haven’t told anyone, I say. I have no one to tell.
My parents are immigrants. They believe you can earn anything you work for. My parents will spend months circling doctors and medicines that will not work. They won’t understand that disease was never meant to be a part of the American dream.
Argyria, I say. I show her a part of my wrist that is already turning grey, like the rest of my body will soon be. My skin is fading away, along with the rest of me, and my sister is here to watch.
Dedeepya Guthikonda is a sixteen-year-old from Minnesota.