Sisters

My sister is two and a half years older than me. I've posted about her before, briefly. We both live in the DC area and we get along very well. We haven't always, though. We never hated each other, but we fought a lot when we were younger. Stupid things like who got to sit in the front seat of the car or whatever. But we were definitely squabblers. I followed her around and she hated it. She bossed me around and I hated it. She always conned me into making trades that were extremely advantageous to her when we played Monopoly. I always got jealous that my friends wanted to hang out with her when they came over.


So no, I definitely wouldn't say that we were best friends growing up. But we were always sisters, we always had that shared understanding of our lives and families that only siblings can have. Still, though, when she left home, everybody was surprised at my reaction.

Though she's only two and a half years older than me, she was always four grades ahead of me because of when our birthdays fell and because she skipped a grade in elementary school. So when she left home, it was the beginning of my freshman year of high school. She was taking a year off before college and going to Spain to live with a host family. She left five days after her 17th birthday. The whole family came to the airport to see her off.

I had hurt my ankle that day at school and was on crutches. It was before September 11, so we were all allowed to go to the gate with her. The gate was very far away from the ticket counter. I had to speed along on my crutches, which I hadn't really learned how to use, and finally gave up and ended up walking on my bad ankle, using my crutches for support. It hurt for weeks after that.

When my sister said goodbye and turned to walk down the ramp to the plane, she cried. A lot. And so did I. I remember what she was wearing--black pants and a blue and white striped top. She had a pack of mint gum so that she could clear her ears on the plane, and before she left she gave me a stick. I sobbed. So did she, but she had more reason, because she was leaving everything. I didn't think she was particularly crying about leaving me. I still actually don't know if that was really a factor.

I cried and cried. I watched her walk away down the ramp, crying, and I cried more. I wanted to stay and watch her plane take off, something my family was not in the habit of doing. My parents were so shocked by the extent of my reaction that they allowed it. We sat in the seats by the window and stared at the plane until it left the gate about half an hour later. I cried the whole time. I cried way longer than my mother.

On the way home, I chewed the mint gum, which probably wasn't a good idea, because I was still sobbing. I almost choked on the gum. My mother made a comment about how she wasn't expecting me to be so upset and I cried so hard that I could barely even answer. When we got home, I wrote a really long journal entry about how traumatized I was. I had stopped crying when I began, but writing it made me cry some more.

The amazing thing was that my sister leaving home was what made us close. We talked every week while she was in Spain. I would waste time telling her about the latest baseball games. She wrote me emails--it was the first year I'd had an email account. When she got back, I had grown several inches and I had to bend over to hug her. We've been very good friends ever since.