My sister had always been the most awkward and secretive child of my family. A quick look at all the children my parents gave birth to might not reveal it. But if you searched deeper for a closer relationship with us, you would have observed the clear contrast between her and the rest of us. It’s like noticing a woody stripe running through the colourful designs of a warm blanket.
Thinking about our many differences often left me in wonder because I used to assume that children from the same parents were bound to share a lot of similarities as a sign of their bond. As I grew older, I began to realize that I had a myopic view of everything. Through experience, I understood that siblings were, in fact, one of the groups with different realities, carrying feelings in opposite directions, and moving through life like people from entirely separate worlds.
If we loved butter, my sister loved jam. If we sat in public for a loud chat, she remained the silent one, contributing just her presence and smiles. If we all wore red dresses to a themed dinner party, she wore her most comfy suit. If anyone tried to correct her, her pride tripled like that of a peacock. This is just me scratching the surface of how different she was.
Despite our differences, I loved my sister deeply. Some days, we would fight, disagree on various subjects, and refuse to speak to each other for hours, until night whispered, forcing us to eat from the same bowl. Other days, you would struggle to find even a trace of hostility between us. Not a single form of tension would be felt in the room. We laughed freely, teased each other for hours unending, and we would often spend the entire day sitting by each other. This made me understand and love her more for being herself.
When I first discovered I could write short lines of fiction, poetry, and even heartfelt essays, one of the earliest thoughts that came to mind was her life. I began to imagine her as my muse, and somewhere between my imaginations, I found the need to get my eyes off her awkwardness and focus only on the beautiful things that struck me.
I imagine that people saw my sister through my eyes. I imagine they looked at her as a young woman with quiet passions, the one with eyes filled with curiosity, capable of empathizing with those surviving the deepest grief. I wanted them to stare at her body and see the kind of strength and beauty that would humble the idea of ageing poorly. I wish everyone saw that her awkwardness was the unique thing that give life to her personality.
Yet these were not the only things I admired about her or wanted others to see. I looked up to her for those abilities that the world knew nothing about: Her hunger for learning, her gift of turning a dull batter into the tastiest bread, and the artistic strength she locked away from everyone after being discouraged by the men with small minds - the ones who visited our home during our early childhood days.
Whenever something went wrong with the television, my father would confidently say, “I have a daughter who can solve that.”
And for all the times we lacked enough ideas to bring a new recipe to life, my mother would say, “I have a daughter who can help save this meal.”
To my siblings and I, she was the final piece of our family's puzzle. Without her, something sweet would be missing from our story.
In all of these, I found it strange that we did not always say “I love you” like some other families did. It was tougher to accept that my sister and I did not have the courage to start expressing our love to each other in words. Instead, our actions spoke for us through the acceptance of shared rooms and personal belongings, all without hesitation.
Our love was present in the way we hugged each other to sleep, as though we had been cut from the same umbilical cord. It showed in how I spoke only good of her in public, how we all laughed at her boring jokes even when we had heard them before, and how my mother fed her and rubbed her back whenever she had a health crisis.
But sometimes, actions are not enough. And because we cannot pull all the actions of love every single day of our lives, tender words are meant to fill the spaces they leave behind. My sister needed words to escape her mind too. But we were all too committed to the familiar, age-long practice of loving through action alone. Only now do I see that both action and words must live in the same room.
Some parts of her life became unbearable to manage, particularly her mental health, and she was dying inside. She did not know how to speak to us about the burden that plagued her mind, so she carried on by fighting the battle of depression alone. At first, we thought that her new routines and deep silence were her usual way of circling back to herself, but we were wrong. Or maybe she was also expressing herself through a series of changed habits, just the way we all had been taught to love with various actions alone. My sister’s struggle with her mental health reminded us that we did, in fact, love her fiercely.
But all that love was incomplete without the reassurance and affirmations of all good things, particularly because we never know which kid grows up needing both.
I wish my siblings and I had tried harder to break the cycle we were raised in. I wish we had learned to say, “I love you,” and “You can talk to me about anything,” to each other. Maybe our sister would not have slipped so far into her head. Maybe the wonderful words of love and admiration we said and wrote in her absence would have saved her mind.
These days, she wakes up with gratitude and tells us how happy she is to have been held by our love. In return, we all tell her how much we love her, each of us giving her a note of affirmation for the week. I now walk through our lonely street with the happiness that she survived her depression. Still, I wish the things we never said out loud found their way to her heart, to protect her from such a soul-crushing experience that took years to overcome.
THANK YOU FOR READING MY SHORT STORY!🤗