My Story.

There’s one person in this world whom I hate.

I was reminded of this the other day when the phone rang. I dislike—but remember, I don’t hate—answering the phone. Especially the house phone. For one, I know the call is never for me since I dislike talking on the phone and have told everyone who knows me such. I go into a weird OCD-like ritual every time I talk on the phone that involves me stopping everything I was doing and start ambling around in weird twisting paths that start in my living room and wrap all the way passed the dinning room up to the front door. I walk on the solid tiles of the flooring—never the mortar lines separating them—until I reach the end of one side of the house and then make my way back. All I can do is walk and talk until the phone call ends. Afterward, I’m usually left puzzled as to why I’m suddenly in the middle of the house when before I was doing something practical, like homework, or enjoyable, like procrastinating, in the comfort of my own room. I think this ritual is both a result of my limited mobility caused by the need to hold the phone close to my ear and my aversion for staying in one place for too long.

As a corollary to the first reason I mentioned, because the phone call is not for me that leaves two options: either the person calling is a member of my extended family or a solicitor. It’s easy to distinguish the two based on their opening line to my greeting; if it’s a relative the response will be in Spanish and if it’s a solicitor it will be in English. For the most part, I don’t like my extended family much either. That’s because most of them have very obvious and annoying vices that surround their personas and the gossip I hear about them from my parents. I have many uncles and one aunt who are drunkards, some are licentious, and some are gamblers or liars, or cheaters. Some are just plain crazy. I have one aunt in particular, from my dad’s side of the family, whom I mercilessly make fun of with my mom. She has arched eyebrows like those of Ronald McDonald and hair that is similar to Kim Jong-il’s. As a gift, she once gave me an empty baby wipes container. I think the need to justify my opinion of her can end there.

On the opposite end of the spectrum I have a minister uncle and my mother’s aunt is a nun. These two might have been considered exceptions to my general feeling toward all my relatives had I been religious. But I’m not, and to this day I still feel waves of embarrassment when I remember last meeting my uncle in the Miami airport. The temperature was somewhere north of 90 degrees and he was wearing his full-on clergyman robes with all the fixings. I remember when I wasn’t distracted by the rivulets of perspiration gliding down the edges of his eyebrows that I’d cast weary glances to see if people were staring at him. They were, and I envisioned their thoughts being a jumbled, detached curiosity or concern over whether or not he’d keel over from heat exhaustion, because that’s what I was thinking.

For a long time, though, I did have one aunt whom I liked. I remember her in my adolescence as being a petite, kindly, soft-spoken woman. I still have pleasant memories of her coming over to my house and she’d play a game with me and my sister in which she would take turns tickling us and the point of the game was to try not to laugh. In my callow innocence and excitement, I’d always begin giggling even before she would lay a ghostly finger on me. In other words, I always lost the game.

That was one reason why my dismay was great on meeting her last. From what I’d heard, she had moved to Germany after marrying a German who had always had a crush on her, had gone through natural childbirth that my mother’s gossip grapevine said was horrible and almost killed her, and was supposedly also fed-up with the German’s parents who lived down the street because they were meddling in their new life together too much for her liking. When they came down to visit us she was completely different from what I remembered. This new woman had grown more rotund and her hair, instead of being neatly held together by a clasp as I remember in my youth, was recalcitrant and unruly like nothing I’d ever seen on a human head before. She was now amblyopic which she most certainly was not in the past or else I was certain it would have haunted my memories. I remember trying to be clandestine as I stared at her eyes that day, my head filled with thoughts on whether that can occur naturally or if it was the result of the laborious childbirth. It was not the Amblyopia that disturbed me, however. Nor was it her hair. Her personality was completely different. She was talkative, and boisterous, and it was her shrill laugh that I heard over the chorus of others’. In sum, she was now different from how I remembered and different from what I considered myself to be and so I stopped liking her.

I usually think of these things—or some abridged version of the sort—when answering the phone. In the short period of time that ensues after I say “hello” but before the person on the other line speaks, I’m already wondering whom it is and they’re relation to me, what they’ll say, and how I’ll reply. It’s a stressful few seconds.

That’s why I usually don’t pick up a call. I prefer to bypass the thoughts, the feelings, the whole situation. But sometimes, the constant ringing of the phone by a bullheaded person who refuses to give up dialing my family's number will make the annoying sound of ringing outweigh the annoyance of answering.

The day I remembered the person I hate was one of those times.

After the person calling had obviously dialed, hung up, and dialed again at least three times I shook the weight of laziness from my right arm, stretched it, and brusquely picked up the phone.

“Hello?” I drawled in a monotonous tone. It was a tone that said, “You better enunciate well ‘cause if I don’t hear you, I won’t ask for a repetition, I’ll just hang up,”—or, at least, that’s what I tried to make it say.

“Is mom home?” the other voice asked.

My sister stopped living under the same roof as my nuclear family right around a year ago. The day she left for good, my mom was uncharacteristically mean to her until she was out the door. Then she turned, and with a teary gaze promised me my sister would never live with us again.

I felt . . . a little relief, and not much else at my mother’s declaration. Afterward, when I reflected on what happened, I thought my mom must not think very highly of me if she expected the news to make me happy. The way she had promised me was like a mother promising their child to take them to a theme park next summer or promising to pick them up after school; it wasn’t something to say in regards to banning a family member from a house.

My heartbeat began to speed up when I heard her speak. I’ve had that reaction to my sister’s voice since . . . I can’t remember. I want to say it was since I knew she had a problem but I can’t remember when that was. And I start to think, was it when she started smoking cigarettes? When she started coming home drunk? When my parents knew she was doing drugs? There are no certainties in my remembrance of my sister. No specific time when she started becoming the person that she is, or when I started hating her.

My jaw had loosened and when I came to that realization I snapped it shut. I was being a bumbling fool around her, again. I felt the weight of each second after she asked her question pressing on my shoulders. But I couldn’t speak; all I could do was form soundless words as my tongue tied itself in knots. I then began to worry. Surely, she’d wonder why I took so long to answer if I replied now. Knowing her gall, she'd probably ask me about it, too.

My first reaction that I could muster was to hang up the phone and unplug it from the wall.

Two other memories first surface on my mind when I think of my scared reaction to my sister. The older memory is the first time she pushed me. That is common amongst siblings that I see today but it was not with me and my sister. My parents brought us up telling us that such a thing was wrong, especially toward family. I remember her being so angry when I wasn’t being serious at all. The argument was over her letting me on the computer. After I had annoyed her to the point of anger with my off-hand complaints she quickly stood up, strode over to me, and shoved me against the wall as she yelled in colorful language that I could go on the computer now. I remember just standing there frozen as my eyes welled up with tears and my heart started beating faster. “She’s crazy”, I thought. “She just pushed me,” I thought. I went crying into my parents’ room instead of going on the computer that day.

I hate her and I’m reminded of that feeling of hatred whenever I think about her, which isn’t often. My mind for the most part works in a way in which it locks up bad memories unless I pry for them with a hatchet. But I do remember her whenever I hear people use the word “hate”.

“I hate math.”

“I hate vegetables.”

When I hear people say things like that I think of how ridiculous they sound. No one hates inanimate objects, they’re inherently neither good nor evil. Most people don’t have these all-consuming feelings of bleak anger and frustration and depression that rolls up into a dark mass that tugs at their heart and plugs their throat toward leafy greens or long division.

The second memory was what put her in rehab.

She had been kicked out many times before and, like always, she was back. Before the big fiasco, I remember my heart begin going spastic just at the sight of her. Having lived with her and seen her on all these controlled substances for so long I usually had difficulty discerning when she was high or drunk and when she was not. This was not one of those times. Her face was as pale as I’d ever seen it and she looked so thin. It was inhuman. And her eyes, I remember them the most. Her pupils were dilated and swarthy. When I looked, the feelings held behind them were a confusing dichotomy of numbed blankness and grieving sadness, I thought. They seemed to say so much and yet so little to me in the short time in which we made eye contact that I’m still not sure.

I think the point of her visit was to pack her stuff and leave but she usually used that as an excuse to be let into the house and make a scene until my parents let her stay. There’s a gap in my memory from when she first came, which I remember was before twilight, and nighttime when my dad came home. They were “talking” in the kitchen. My mom rushed in to my room when the yelling escalated and told me to lock it. Hearing her say that always used to scare me. My thoughts would race through the implications of her words and when alone at night such thoughts would sometimes seep into my nightmares. Was she crazy or high (or some combination of the two) enough to try to kill my parents and then finish me off for dessert? Or did she have some deep-seeded hatred for her sister who always avoided her that she would go for me first? Neither prospect was ever any comfort to my composure.

I unlocked the door to peek at what was going on when I heard my dad yelling and the sounds of chairs scrapping against the flooring. Oftentimes my dad yells so loud that the person being yelled at can’t help but shut their mouth immediately and do as their told, but my sister, in her foggy world, decided to match his volume.

I heard loud, shrieking howls come from my sister and my dad let out a grunt, with startled exclamations from my mom in the background before I could glimpse behind the edge of a wall to see what was happening. My dad started yelling at my mom to call the police.

Distraught, confused, and in tears I shakily crept toward the end of the hallway to see what was going on in the kitchen. There was a long flow of blood on the floor next to a knife that seemed to have been slapped away from someone’s hand. I made sure it was my dad who was pinning down my sister to the ground and not the other way around before fleeing to my room again. The space between my bookshelf and the foot of my bed is about two feet wide and I flung myself there to cry until the whole thing was over.

From there, all I had were sounds to tell me what was going on outside my room. It was sobs, mainly, from all four of us. I also remember my sister yelling for one last cigarette over and over again, the desperation in her voice made it sound like she would die if she didn’t get one. My dad’s response was telling her that he loved her as he cried. When I heard the police come, I wasn’t sure what I should do or if it was safe to go out yet.

My mom was the first person to come into my room, which momentarily gave me a huge fright from the suddenness. She had stopped crying by then but when she saw me she looked like she would burst into tears anew.

My sister was put into the back of a police car and I didn’t see her again until about a month later when my parents forced me to visit her in rehab. That night ended with my parents and me going to the hospital for my dad to get stitches on his arm. She still thinks the incident was my father’s fault and hasn’t apologized for a thing.

There’s one person in this world whom I hate, and I really dislike remembering it.