Animoulx

I was about her age now this picture. She is weathering adolescence with much more grace and far less grease in her t-zone.

Today is my little sister’s birthday. My family moved me to New York four years ago today, on her 13th birthday, and I will never forgive myself for stealing her special day. 13-year-olds don’t give a shit about New York, nor should they. There were tears, there was moody looks and grumpiness, and ultimately a very nice dinner at a semi-fancy restaurant in Soho where my 13-year-old sister ordered the steak, and I, the 23-year-old embarking on a new chapter in her life, ordered the mac and cheese. But no matter what thoughts I’m having about myself today (oh, and I’m having some!), they’re not important! 

Because I was ten-going-on-eleven when she was born and hated being an only child, it’s impossible to overstate how important she is to me and how much i love her. She helped me grow up and learn about responsibility as an infant, as a toddler endured entire days being dolled up in sparkly makeup and pillow-case gowns and then obliging me through protracted photo shoots on the front lawn, and has generally made being part of a family more fun.

My mom likes to say that we’re both only children; the formative years of my childhood were spent sibling-less, and then I moved away when my sister was 7, leaving her the only child at home ever since. Separate lonely childhoods or no, having a sister is the greatest and I can only imagine will get better and better as we both age and the ten-year gap that has always left us simultaneously in very very different parts of our lives will, poof, become nothing, a speck of cosmic dust, when we’re both adults. We’re already on our way! She no longer tries to annoy me on purpose to get my attention—I can’t remember the last time I uttered my catch phrase: “you’re being difficult just to be difficult!” Of course that means she doesn’t call me out of the blue to chew into the phone and describe her lunch in detail or hug me too long and refuse to let go, I’ll get used it. I’m getting used to it. Because no matter what, having a sister is the best. 

Are all good things in life just about trying to get back to childhood (please, what does Freud say about this)? Every comfort, every happy memory seems to have its origins somewhere back home, sometime back then. Lawnmowers in summer, loud fans in hot rooms—even the taste of vinegar, which I hated as a child but which reminds me of dinner at my grandma’s and which I currently cannot live without. My grandmother is wearing light blue polyester shorts and a sleeveless blouse with knee high nylons and thick-soled beige loafers. She’s humming loudly and flapping her arms with her lower chin jutted out slightly. She’s putting bowls of beets and cucumbers and onions and tomatoes and potato salad on the table, all stewing in vinegar, and I won’t eat any of it. This barely even registers at the time, but the memory, likely an amalgamation of several, is incredibly clear 20 years later.

Why don’t sights and sounds and smells trigger warm fuzzies about things that happened 1, 2, 3 years ago? Are all adult experiences inherently flawed by virtue of being experienced filtered through an imperfect and critical mind? Or am I reflecting too soon? I’m too damn young still, right? In 20 years when I hear the unmistakable loud jar and clang of a semi-truck hitting a pothole, I’ll fondly remember those heady days in Brooklyn,  just steps from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway—no doubt. Right?