The Love Stories Of Two Sisters (Flash Fiction Part 1)

Image by Jess Foami from Pixabay

Flash Fiction #160

Cia and I were college roommates, and I can still remember looking into her eyes when I was chewing instant noodles as my midnight snack. She looks so young, fresh faced. Now looking back, I realize that she was perpetually searching for love and acceptance in her own puzzling ways. Now more than twenty years later, I know what I should have said to her, but at the time I was probably as puzzled as she was. It’s a wonder we’ve all muddled through the confused mess that’s called life, crawled in and out of the pitfalls made by the system and by ourselves, and along the way “written” our own tragicomedies.

At the time when Cia was in college, her sister Shermei was a graduate student in a college twenty miles away from us. Shermei only visited our campus once a year, and I had only been meeting and talking with her for less than three hours altogether. However I felt that I knew Shermei a lot for the simple reason that Cia often talked about her sister. Whenever Cia talked about something that had happened in her family, she talked about her sister.

“My sister Shermei is so outgoing, so pretty, so admired by everybody. My mother has always favored her. She always has new clothes and new toys. Even school teachers favor her. And all the boys want to be with her. But you know she is not a good daughter to my parents. When she traveled overseas, she never bought anything for my parents. My mother was quite upset with her, but Shermei just goes her own ways.” Cia would tell me.

I listened in silence. I couldn’t encourage her to talk more since I had no intention of talking about my own family, which was a perpetual battleground for my warring parents. I listened and formed a very unfavorable image of Shermei, who’s obviously an ungrateful daughter, an ungracious sister, and probably even a heartless witch in human form.

However, reflecting on the past later on, I realized that her sister is just a normal girl, who didn’t bond with her own family. And my diagnose is that the family is a narcissistic family. Although the parents were not so extremely narcissistic like my own parents, they created a family environment filled with competition, derision and distrust. Since the tension was usually clothed in mild mannered appearances and psudo-congeniality, Cia and Shermei grew up not being aware of the true nature of their family.

So here is my diagnose and recount of Cia and Shermei’s family, the two sisters’ love affairs, and my regret concerning my own relationship with Cia. My behavior as a non-responsive grey rock, a role I had been accustomed to at home, was of little help to Cia, who had been confused and disoriented by her own family situation. If I knew then what I know now, I could have helped her. But I didn’t back then.

(To Be Continued Here)