when are you coming to visit?

on the only sister i've ever known

Always, I wanted a sister.

I spent my childhood and teenage years lamenting over it. When I learned my youngest sibling was a boy and not the girl I had been wishing for, I sobbed into my grandmother’s shoulder.

I’d read books about sisters and watch my friends with their own and see my mom and my aunt and wish that I had that. I’d never had to share, but I could learn. I was used to having my own room, but I could make room for her. We’d fight for most of our youth but then I’d have someone, later, when it really counted.

I wanted her so badly while throwing a fit over my grandmother buying my little cousin the same Christmas presents as me; while we’d fight over American Girl doll clothes and the roles we’d play in our reenactment of High School Musical; while we’d make up dances and play mermaids in the pool and kick each other off the bed during our fourth sleepover in a row.

I wished and wished for a sister, so completely unaware that I already had one.

It wasn’t until that closeness was gone, when I was in high school and she was still a preteen, that I could name it. That it felt like something had been taken from me. Often, I think I came to resent it, that our kind of sisterhood wasn’t built in, that the gap between us might not matter as much if we had no choice but to stay in the other’s orbit. And then I was in college and she was sixteen and the chasm wouldn’t shrink.

I missed her, but I’d never say it. It was weird, watching her life from afar, watching her grow up detached from me when we had spent so much of our childhood glued together.

When she was in college, she’d facetime me from her dorm and I’d watch while she did her makeup or get ready to go to class and tuck away every piece of her life she was willing to offer me. I’d listen to the stories about her shitty boyfriend and her nightmare roommates and all I ever wanted to say was come home, come home, come home.

I have nothing to hold any of this up against. I don’t know if this is what having a sister is supposed to be like. To feel like you know her like she’s a reflection of you but also not at all. To lose the closeness and not know how to pull her back. To make her want to come back.

It was like I had missed my chance. I was a teenager who didn’t want her little cousin around. I was too grown up, too busy. I didn’t want to wear the same clothes or the same shoes or do the same things. I know it was a simple side-effect of growing up, but there was nothing holding us together. For a long time, we barely saw one another, only coming together at family events and in passing. Our relationship was stilted, and uncomfortable, and foreign. My mom promised that we’d come back together when we were older, that it would be natural and easy and like there was never a gap in the first place. I didn’t know if I could believe her, when her and her sister were tethered in a way that wasn’t of their own making. They were two trees born rooted in the same ground.

I know that it’s a choice for us, now. When she comes to visit and we share my bed like we did when we were girls but now instead of watching the Barbie movies we’re scrolling on our phones; when we’re together at a concert, drinking and singing and leaning on each other; when I call her crying from a hotel room because I know she’ll pick up; when we’re sometimes too honest, and maybe a little too harsh, with our advice, but know the trust is there to hold us together no matter what’s said.

I think, and write, often of the weekend she came down to help put my apartment together. We painted my walls pink and drank wine and put furniture together and listened to Dance Fever and sat with our aunt’s frogs and grieved. All I could think was this is what I’ve been missing.

Always, I want her to come home.

I feel like a saleswoman as I take her in and out of my favorite book shops, like I’m trying to convince her of something I’m not even sure of myself. Choosing someone means they can one day stop choosing you. We listen to the same music, like similar books, drink the same cocktails, but we live in different states. Everything we have feels tenuous despite its strength. We don’t forget one another, we don’t not answer calls—but we could. Is that a fear for everyone else? Are we without a comfort that others have? I don’t know.

But I bottle every conversation. We make dinner together over the phone. I track down men who were awful to her on the internet. We sit on my couch in comfortable silence for hours. She tells me to dip my fries in buffalo sauce and I listen. We spin a wheel and watch whatever rom com it lands on. We sit on facetime until three am and talk about nothing. We laugh in a stall in the bathroom of a dive bar. I tell her when she’s making a bad decision and she’s honest with me when I’ve made a mistake. I share my bed and my clothes and my shoes and my wine and I will never be mad about it because how fucking lucky are we?

To choose one another again and again and again. How fucking lucky.