It had been years since I had returned to this place. The house I grew up in, abandoned and in ruins. Yet the rusty old wind chimes still sang, welcoming me home. I pushed open the tattered gate, painted brown by time, and walked into the old front yard where I'd spent countless hours playing with my sister. As I looked around, the house repaired itself in my mind. White sheets on the clothesline swung in the wind, imaginary ghosts of the past. The grass, patchy and dead stayed the same. The peeling blue paint was suddenly pristine again, the same hue as the sky.

            I turned around, head upturned toward the trees. Everything was coming back to me, a flood of thoughts and memories. My parents still alive, my sister only a baby. I walked toward the front door, a hole near the top disappearing as the door became familiar to me, the one I had known as a child. Stark white against the blue siding, with a single cracked window that became whole again. The inside of the house was in ruins, but I could still see exactly where everything had been. The kitchen table and its four chairs- one for each of us- were still there. There was only one left standing. The lone chair and I were one and the same. I walked over to it, sat down, and let out a breath I didn't know I had been holding. For a moment, I closed my eyes and remembered my mom cooking dinner, my dad teasing her from the table. My sister and I giggling together in the next room. When I opened my eyes, I was alone. Their voices faded with the illusion, carried away by the wind that swept through the decrepit house. The sunshine streamed in through broken windows and the cracked ceiling, painting the interior with soft golden light. It was beautifully ironic.

            I found myself thinking of everything left unsaid to my family. I hadn't come to see my parents in nearly two years when I got the call that they were killed in a car accident. My sister and I attended the funeral together. All dressed in black, we could pass for twins. Her brunette hair was pulled up into a high ponytail, her severe features almost identical to my own. She was just barely taller than me and spared me only a single glance from behind her sunken eyes.

            My sister also didn't speak to me at the funeral. I could understand why. In my family’s eyes, I had abandoned them to study and then start a career. I remembered that toward the end of the funeral, she shed only a single tear while I shed none. I couldn't bring myself to cry for my parents, it was if they were old acquaintances, not the people who raised me. My parents and I had a fine relationship until I left. They didn't want me to become a teacher, told me it wouldn't pay. I was the one who paid for the funeral however, with money from a job they doubted. A funeral for strangers.

            My sister died almost exactly a year later. She was ill, terminally. The doctors told me she had lung cancer, but I didn't hear from her until after she was gone. I had no idea she was sick, but she left everything to me. Along with her few belongings, she left me a stack of letters. They were each dated, chronologically leading to the day she died. The penmanship was shaky, full of remorse. It got harder to read as the dates crept up to the date of her death, her struggle to write becoming obvious. She wrote that she was sorry, that she wished we could've had a better relationship. She told me she understood why I left, only understood days before her death. She apologized once more in her letters and parted with a wish for her ashes to be spread here, in the house we grew up in, a house that had been abandoned for some time now, my parents having moved out a decade or so ago.

            I did cry at my sister's funeral. I don't understand why, we had barely spoken in three years. I think the letters restored a connection, albeit a very broken one. I spoke at her funeral, choking on my own words. I was finally able to realize how much a part of me she was. I lost some of myself. I didn’t say goodbye to her that day.

            I realized now, sitting in my old chair, that many pieces of me were escaping from under my skin, memories flooding my mind. Something dropped onto the urn holding my sister’s ashes- a tear, and then another. I felt a dull ache beneath my lungs, my heart, my bones. I missed them. My mind was filled with regrets, but I also knew that it was much too late to have them, to make everything okay.  

            I stood up then, my vision blurry, and stepped into the backyard. I laid in the grass, my arms splayed on either side, my sister’s ashes in the urn next to me. And I looked at the sky, watched the clouds, and tried to imagine my parents and my sister accepting my apologies. Part of me felt as though I could hear them whispering apologies back to me, ethereal words carried on the wind.

            And I screamed. I screamed until all the nightmares and regrets and memories left. I screamed until I was left with only myself, the grass, the sky, and the trees. I screamed until my throat was raw and my voice became a scratchy tear through the wind.

            I wiped the tears from my face and opened the urn. I ran around the yard letting the ashes spill out. I could almost feel my sister running next to me, laughing with me, holding my hand, just as we used to do as kids. This time, I whispered a goodbye. The wind tore it from my mouth, and I wasn’t sure I’d actually said anything at all. I hoped it would reach her.

            I walked back into the house, picking up the upturned chairs, making a family again. I left the mostly empty urn on my sister's chair and put the stack of her letters on my own. Returning to the backyard, I spun in a circle, my arms outstretched, my palms and face turned towards the cerulean sky. I could feel the regret slipping away, pieces of me I would gladly lose. Looking at the house one last time, the image of it when I was a child still overtaking the crumbling ruins, I pushed open the gate as it squeaked in protest. With my back turned from the house one last time, I walked away, my long coat swirling around my legs as I struggled against the wind. With it went the unwanted pieces and scars, regrets, and memories I didn't care to keep.