Page 152 of No Rings Attached
That day changed everything for both of us.
The memory hit me with startling clarity. I was in sixth grade and had joined the backstage crew hoping to spend time with my sister since we’d started to grow apart. The little boy playing the lead opposite of Celia had a meltdown, and I distracted him and helped him calm down. One of the backdrops started to fall, but I noticed in time to alert the drama teacher. And when Celia froze and couldn’t remember her lines, I’d whispered them to her from the wings.
“I was just trying to help. I was trying to be close to you again.”
Celia continued as though I hadn’t spoken, “Everyone thought you weresucha hero. Even Mom and Dad said you did a good job.”
I also remembered my parents acknowledging me that day—it was so rare to hear any kindness from them. But I soon realized they said it because my teacher was nearby, and they knew it would look bad if they didn’t. I think that day marked the beginning of me bending over backwards, trying to be the ‘good girl’ to gain their affection.
We were both broken that day. Just in different ways.
Little had we known that Celia and I shared the moment that shaped the rest of our lives—we’d just walked away with opposite wounds.
“I didn’t know.” My voice cracked again. The weight of all those years pressed down on me—the anger, the hurtful treatment, all because she’d been jealous. All because she thought I had it easier. “Celia, I didn’t know you felt that way.”
And if I had known? Would I have changed anything?That was a hard observation to accept. I don’t know if I was strong enough at the time.
My chest ached with the realization we’d spent over a decade hurting each other, both of us fighting for scraps of love from people incapable of giving it.
“I thought you had everything,” I admitted, my throat ached. “Mom and Dad’s attention, their pride, their affection. I would have given anything for them to look at me the way they looked at you.” Tears spilled down my cheeks. “But it wasn’t real, was it? The attention came with conditions. With pressure to be perfect. And I got … I got nothing either way.”
We were both starving for attention we should have gotten all along.
Celia’s expression flickered—something vulnerable passing across her face before her walls slammed back up.
“We both lost,” I whispered. “They pitted us against each other, we spent years fighting over their love when neither of us was actually getting it.”
For a moment, I saw a flash of the sister I’d once known. The girl who played dolls with me, who’d let me braid her hair, who’d held my hand on the first day of school.
Was she in there somewhere? Or was she gone forever?
I stood there, shaking with the weight of everything that had been laid bare between us.
At this moment, I had maybe more than an ounce of sympathy for my sister. It couldn’t have been easy thinking that to be loved, you had to be perfect. That any crack in the façade meant losing everything.
But that didn’t excuse what she’d done.
The reality was that as adults, we made choices. We could continue to let our past define us, use it as a shield to hurt or push people away, or allow it to explain away our bad behavior.
That trauma, though, at some point, needed to be dealt with. Or we needed to find a way to not use it as an excuse to make everyone around us miserable. We had to take ownership of our feelings, our actions, our words.
Today, I was doing exactly that.
I would no longer seek my parents approval, my sister’s—or anyone else’s, for that matter.
My mental health, my sanity, my ability to love myself and my life was far more important than the obsessive need I had to win over people who didn’t deserve my love.
I choose me.
Finally, I choose me.
Drew’s arms wrapped around me from behind, and I leaned into their safety, letting him ground me as the trembling slowly subsided.
That’s when I noticed them.
The cameras.
Red lights blinking in the background. At least two of them, positioned just outside the parlor, capturing every word, every expression, every ugly truth Celia had just spewed.
