Michiel—Imoatsu

Michiel’s relationship with his sister endures in the form of a worn photograph, a story he has kept from his parents, and a burden he says he took on after her death. He loved her and wanted to protect her; he also believed that her illness and hidden criminal life had made the family’s situation impossible to explain simply. When he finally tells Emma what happened, affection and resentment, loyalty and fear remain intertwined.

Family and the photograph

Michiel’s account begins with the small photograph he removes from his cigarette case. It shows a young woman with long, curly hair and bright green eyes, smiling toward the camera. The paper is softened by handling and marked by old folds; it has been trimmed to fit the case, so that he can keep it close. The object makes his attachment visible before he explains it. Asked whether the woman is his girlfriend, he says she is his sister.

He was adopted after his parents were unable to have children. His mother later became pregnant, and his sister was born into the same family. Michiel describes himself as never quite belonging in the same way, despite insisting that his parents did not mistreat or neglect him. He completed his training and joined his father’s hairdressing business, and he presents his early life as outwardly settled. But the difference between being adopted and being the biological child remained emotionally charged: after his sister’s death, he would explain his choices by saying that he was not their child in quite the same way she was.

Her illness and death

Michiel remembers his sister as exceptionally charming, someone who could win over him and their parents and seemed unable to do wrong in their eyes. He also says she was eventually diagnosed with manic-depressive illness. In his account, she was in a manic, intensely elevated state, and the family’s affection for her made it difficult to see her clearly. He loved her and says he would have done anything to keep her alive, yet admits that he sometimes thinks her death may have been the only way events could end. His statement does not cancel his grief; it reveals how grief has become entangled with the terrible possibility that her life had become untenable.

A year after her diagnosis, his sister died by suicide. The family’s understanding of her life was incomplete. After the funeral, Michiel learned that she had carried a loaded gun and had been one of the largest drug dealers in the area. The discovery transformed the loss into a threat: people connected to her criminal activity could come after Michiel, then his father’s business, and eventually his parents. The photograph’s place in the cigarette case and the concealed life revealed after her death belong to the same portrait, but they are not easy to reconcile.

The secret he took on

Michiel says he took over everything connected to his sister in order to shield their parents. He had known that she kept a supply of pills, but the extent of her drug dealing was another matter. He did not go to the police or tell his parents what she had been involved in. In his view, they had just lost their daughter, and exposing the full story would have taken away the account of her death that they could bear: the belief that she had been a victim, rather than someone who had helped bring about her own destruction.

That decision did not preserve his parents from pain so much as redirect the burden toward him. He describes himself as taking on his sister’s world to keep it from reaching his family. The autopsy showed that she had used drugs, and his parents could not understand how she had obtained them. Two years later, a customer let slip information to his father. Michiel’s role as a dealer became known, and his parents concluded that he had supplied his sister and caused her death. He had withheld the truth to protect them, but the eventual disclosure gave them a different, devastating explanation—one in which their surviving child was implicated in the loss of the other.

Grief, loyalty, and what he tells Emma

The disclosure takes place after Emma asks Michiel why he alternates between speaking to her, ignoring her, and disappearing for days. He reaches into his cigarette case and lets her hold the photograph. The scene moves from her uncertainty about their relationship to the history he has not previously shared. His confession is therefore not only about his sister: it explains why closeness with Emma has become difficult and why her presence brings old memories back.

Michiel eventually says that, at the hospital, Emma’s talk about flying had made him feel as though he could hear his sister again, speaking about the sensation of flying. The connection is not that Emma and his sister are interchangeable, but that Emma’s words reopen an experience he has carried silently. His sister’s memory enters their relationship through a specific echo, connecting her manic state and death to the unsettled bond between the two patients.

Emma responds by distinguishing Michiel’s place in the family from the lesser place he assigns himself: he is also his parents’ child. She suggests that protecting their dream of their daughter’s innocence may have cost them their relationship with him as well. Michiel looks affected, returns the photograph carefully to its case, and acknowledges the possibility without fully resolving it. His story ends as a disclosure rather than a reconciliation: the secret has been spoken to Emma, while the family’s account and the consequences of his silence remain painful. The photograph stays close, carrying both his love for his sister and the history he had tried to contain.