2020-06-27 / 4:24 p.m.

I have a tiny little plant sitting in my bedroom window and for the second time it looks as though it's dying. Maybe it'll come back around this time. Maybe it won't. Pink flowers and green leaves. I sit and I stare, imagining where it might have ended up if I hadn't taken it home. That day that I visited Joanne, my cousin, and I started to feel as though she might have been seeing me clearly for the first time in our lives. I bought her a similar, larger plant. A housewarming gift for a couple who had lived in their home for nearly half a year already. But they still haven't had their kitchen installed, so time isn't a concept that exists in Ballycullane. Or so I told myself as I left, taking roads that are different from the ones by which I came.

I am antsy. I am anxious. I stare at my plant. For context, I live with my parents at thirty years of age. I have a free public transport pass, one of those ones you only get if you're disabled. Except I'm too disabled to walk the half an hour to the nearest bus stop. So it sits somewhere in the back of my card purse that I carry because I'm no longer able to commit to anything heavier.

I have one sibling - a brother - and he's married with a child. She's a sick baby. She almost died. We ate her christening cake when she was in hospital following emergency brain surgery, because it was too late to cancel it, and it would've been a waste to throw it in the bin.

My relationship with my brother has always been strained. I've never been able to shake the feeling that he hates me, but I don't know if that theory is founded in any form of reality. He used to beat me up when we were children. I have memories of him kicking me in the head because he lost a life on Crash Bandicoot and I happened to be sitting quietly beside him. I have nightmares that he rapes me, which I've never said aloud, and sometimes I wonder if maybe there's something tugging at my brain that I just can't quite remember. But you're not supposed to suggest those things, so I talk to nobody but myself.
I sat on his bed early one morning as a young child while he slept just so I could play his PlayStation, but I turned my head too quickly and I hurt my neck. Another very early sign of EDS that was promptly ignored. When he woke, he laughed at the fact that I was hurting, and I ran into the hallway confused and feeling sick, calling for my mother. The last thing I remembered was leaning against her, reaching up for her, the noise of my body sliding down against her plastic apron and my brother, aged nine, on the phone to the doctor saying "My sister hurt her neck". And then I was gone.
He threatened to kill my dog when I was away at college, at eighteen, so I had to come home and scoop her up and take her away with me. A puppy and an almost baby, lost with nowhere to go. This was mere months after he didn't visit me once in the hospital after I had tried and failed to kill myself. Never a mention of it. I've always wondered why he didn't come, but he's not the kind of person that I could ask.

He outgrew his anger as we got older, and my friends think that he is kind, and I sometimes believe it too. His wife and him are sometimes nice to me, but today I sit staring at my plant as my parents are at my niece's christening, and I'm sitting home with an old dog that he had threatened to kill all of those years ago. A blatant exclusion and I shouldn't even care but I do. My parents, the people who have trained us never to talk about things, they left today as I came home from a walk, limping and tired, asking me if I had enough money, but never addressing the fact that they're leaving me behind again.

I feel like that child flapping around on the landing, almost vomiting in pain, laughter in the background. Only this time the laughter isn't stopping, and there's no call to the doctor before everything turns black.

My family will let my disability kill me slowly, but none of us will ever talk about it.