I remember being about seven or eight years old. I remember my parents asking my sister where the scars on her forearms had come from. She had told them that she had seen a cat as she was walking home and that when she had tried to pick it up, it scratched her. They believed her; I believed her.

I remember it being a month or two after that. A counselor from her school had come over for an urgent meeting with my parents. I was young, but as I stood in the kitchen, I could piece together the point of all that was being said: my sister had been trying to cut herself in class using a pencil.

It didn't affect me then, but now I cry when I think about it because now here I am inflicting pain upon myself with any sharp thing I can find, anywhere I can be discreet, and blaming it on the pretty "cat" I saw. It didn't occur to me then that I would take her place once she got tired of playing that game. History does repeat itself; I just wish it had chosen someone else.