The Outstanding Sisters |
People don’t always know how to respond when they learn I have a sister I don’t speak to. Some rush to fix it: You should reach out. Others turn it into a moral equation: But she’s your sister.
What I want to say is more complicated: Shared history, instead of binding, can calcify. The roles we learned as children—protector, translator, witness—can become too small, too rigid, to contain the people we grow into. Case in point: the two versions of my sister.
The first is easy to hold: she is small, quick, always half a step behind me, as if my shadow had learned to speak. We share a home, a backseat, a language made of glances. I know how to make her laugh. I know what scares her. I know the tone that will bring her running, or send her away. In this version, our lives are braided so tightly it does not occur to me that they could ever come apart.
The second is harder. She is an adult now, somewhere else, living a life that does not intersect with mine. I do not know what she eats for breakfast, or the names of her friends, or what she tells people about her childhood—whether I appear in those stories at all. In this version, we are not braided. We are parallel lines, once touching, now moving quietly away.
Estrangement is a strange kind of loss. There is no funeral, no shiva, no sanctioned moment to say: something irrevocable has happened. The loss........