by Randi Miller

Created on: March 04, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Sitting at the top of the stairs, my legs dangling through the banister rails, I listened to my parents fighting in the kitchen downstairs. My sister sat silently next to me, both of us nervous and fingering the fuzzy balls of lint that dotted the knees of our pajamas, both of us wondering if this night the fighting would travel up the steps as it had so many times before.

I could feel my heart beating in my throat, hear the pounding in my 8 year-old ears, like water rushing over my head, giving me the sensation of drowning. Suddenly I realized I wasn't breathing, and just as I gasped for air, so did my sister, and our eyes locked in silent terror.

It was a scene that repeated almost nightly, with my father coming home at 6 with an armful of beer and the rest of us waiting for 9:00 when the games would begin. Whoever showed the most emotion and bled the hardest psychologically was chosen most often. My sister seemed to get picked quite a bit, and I was a witness to the persecution.

We spent those long war years huddled together in this bizarre foxhole, and yet as time rolled past us, through us, and over us, my sister's memory of this uniquely tragic bond somehow faded. She pushed me away and disappeared into the ether of adulthood, swimming deftly into the deep waters of drug addiction and self destruction. It would be ten years before I knew whether or not she was even still alive.

What separates us from our own realities?

What allows one to overcome the same horrors that cripple another?

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