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newfound skills to the test when school started again. At long last, I was going to be a member of the school band!
    The end of that summer felt triumphant. There was so much to be happy about.
    Though life in our home had been difficult at times, this summer had developed a different tone. My stepmother seemed more relaxed and less prone to anger. We were getting along, almost bonding even. The support that she had offered in helping me find my way to music seemed to open the door to a new understanding between us. For the first time in a very long time, it seemed like we all might be able to live in harmony.
    I looked forward to my sister’s return to the fold. I couldn’t wait for her to share in what seemed a positive shift in our home. It had seemed that, in recent years, she and I had been struggling to stay connected to one another. Our past family struggles cameto affect us in different ways. I had found my hope through the lean times in reaching out through creative expression of writing and music. It wouldn’t be until she came back home that I would learn about where she kept her own hope.
    Our time apart had seemed to veer us in two distinctly different paths of survival. It turned out that my sister had kept her hopes stored in moving to Mom’s once she was old enough to enforce her choice in the court system. During my last visit of the summer, together again at my mother’s, I learned of it. Mom was clear that I, too, could make a similar choice, but she was also careful to make certain that I felt no pressure to arrive at the same conclusion.
    â€œYour sister has decided that she wants to move here, with me. I want you to know that you can do the same, if you choose. But I want you to know, that I will love you no matter what. Whatever you decide, I will love you and support you.”
    I couldn’t imagine what life apart from my sister would look like, nor could I imagine altering my current vision of following music. Through the years, I had often dreamed of running away, and had attempted to do so on more than one occasion. I had spent countless hours imagining that life would be better, more pleasant, more openly loving in my mother’s world, but now that I was faced with the reality of actually making it happen, I couldn’t get over the idea that I was in some way forced to choose between the music that had become my safety net and a life with her that I didn’t seem to have the courage to test.
    In the years to come, I would be haunted by the picture of my sister coming home and packing her things from the room where everything had always been ours. I would struggle with the strange conflicting feelings of being abandoned by her and thefrivolous teenage joy of finally having a bedroom to myself. The idea that I had, for the first time in my life, made a clearly individual decision, independent of our collective personality, was empowering and, at the same time, a choice that made me feel a fool. I saw myself as lacking in courage in comparison to her. I couldn’t help but feel that my choice was an act of betrayal to her love and to my mother’s, but in the end I chose to stay in the place I had always called home, in my father’s world.

five
    L ife, as it always seems to do, moved callously forward, oblivious to my need to regain my breath. There seemed to be a hole in my universe. My sister was gone now, and I was on my own. I was brokenhearted and trying to make sense of it all.
    The idyllic summer of eased tensions with my stepmother came to an end, only to ramp back up to our usual cycle of emotional turmoil. We did not know how to comfort one another. We did not know how to love. Once again, every conflict of our home pressed on the bruise that was our family brokenness. We were either in all-out war or locked in icy silence. Whatever my family had been was crumbling.
    I felt I could no longer rely on my father to bridge the gap of our family