Pillow problems

Growing up, my cousin was my best friend. We were born less than a year apart and naturally became each other’s first friend. No one else competed for the role, as her brother was the only other cousin in the area, and he was a bit of a rebel who preferred to carve out his own path.

That all changed when my sister was born. She was the family’s little angel, and even her name suggested such. The family fawned over her, especially my father, who was immediately wrapped around her finger.

One holiday, my cousin and I peered into the crib of this sweet cherub, saddened that she had taken the focus off of us. The feeling of love that comes with being the center of someone’s universe is deeply missed when it fades. This fact was not lost on us; we felt lonely, abandoned, unimportant.

We stared at her as she slept, jealousy growing. My best friend and I exchanged a look as something came over us an unspoken decision to resolve what we considered a problem.

At the tender ages of four and five, respectively, we grabbed a pillow and momentarily placed it over the side of her face; or at least, that’s how we remember it.

Memories are tricky. They change over time, with fiction replacing fact. People are able to convince themselves that they remember things the way they want to, in a more dramatized way that makes for better stories.

That may have happened here. We were small and the walls of the crib were high. There was no pillow nearby, and we would have struggled to reach her even if there had been one. How would we have even known to put a pillow over someone’s head? We may not have known, and we may never know for certain.

This is a story we tell people these days, perhaps as a way to say we felt abandoned. Maybe we like to tell it because it sounds so dramatic, so absolute.

We may never have touched a pillow that day, but there was a day when harm befell my sister on account of a weaponized cushion.

Roughly five years later, my sister and I sat on the floor atop these rough, sizable bean bag knockoff pillows watching wrestling. At that age, we played together a lot and she tagged along to whatever I, her big brother, wanted to do.

In this particular instance, I wanted to wrestle. The wrestlers on TV threw each other around and hit one another with whatever was nearby, which always seemed to be a folding chair.

Inspired by what I saw, and what I did not know was fake, I picked up the pillow, said we should wrestle, and hit her with the pillow. I must have expected her to convulse like Hulk Hogan, and then bounce back stronger than before, ready to hit me back.

That did not happen. She fell back a surprising distance and hit her head on the pointed edge of the wall, cracking her skull open.

I panicked. I freaked out. The fight or flight instinct kicked in, and I was able to fight no longer.

Out of pure instinct, I ran into the kitchen, grabbed whatever food I could carry, and locked myself into my room. I planned on living out my life in my room to avoid getting beaten with the business end of my father’s belt.

Unlike the smothering tale, this recollection may not be as convoluted. There are literal and figurative scars that serve as concrete evidence, the most notable of which is that my sister no longer sleeps with a pillow.