A few weeks ago, as spring break came to a close and I prepared to leave my Key West haven, I couldn’t find my sister.
It was a Wednesday, and in a hungover haze sissy and I trekked to a coffee shop with an expansive porch and ordered a couple of café con leches. I sat on the porch with my iPad, attempting to “do work” in the sunny, 80-degree weather. My sister told me she was going to run across the street to a small Cuban market to grab some lunch. I nodded, not looking away from my screen, and 15 minutes later, I was standing, crying, in the middle of the street.
I thought sissy had been kidnapped. She had left her phone, her still-full cup of coffee and her notebook. How long does it take to look through a tiny market across the street? I called my friends in our hotel room, frantic.
“How long has she been gone?” they asked.
“Ten minutes, maybe more!” I screamed.
We laugh about it now. Ten minutes. Probably not quite long enough to send out an Amber alert. My friends came to where I was, rolling out of bed and still wearing their pajamas, but by that time my long-lost sister had returned. “Sorry, I went down the street and the line was long.”
I was holding her, sobbing, clutching her shoulders as she clutched her Cuban sandwich. I had not seen her come out of the market, I cried, I thought someone had taken her. We are still laughing about it now — the absurdity of it all, my reaction, my terror. But I can’t shake the feeling I had in those 15 minutes when I had no clue where my sister was — my older, responsible, always diligent sister. The ground had fallen out from under me and I was floating between the sea and the sky, no longer existing in a world with anyone else.
My sister and I often write love letters to each other in this public sphere, letters with words we often cannot voice. Because too often, the everyday doesn’t allow for such an outward display of emotion. The everyday means fighting about bath towels, blaming each other for whatever is going wrong and arguing about who has it worse. Daily love is mean and complicated. But sometimes, like a few weeks ago when I thought I’d lost my sister forever, we remember why we love in the first place.
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like my sister. Don’t worry, I fully recognize the apparent irony of saying that about my twin. We feel and think every moment in sync. But the differences in the way we act rival even DNA.
My sister is anxious, almost all of the time. I can feel it, I can see it. The way she sighs when she walks into the living room, the way she doesn’t respond when I say something sassy. She is always caught up in her head, caught up in the thoughts which plague her even when I hold her and shake her and tell her it will all be okay. Because my sister does everything the way it should be done, but she doesn’t know it. She waitresses and makes hundreds of dollars in one week. She buys groceries for the both of us and hugs me when I’m sad and balances her boyfriend with her best friends. She analyzes novels and cries over sentences and writes papers that are the best the professor has seen in years. And she doesn’t even realize the magnitude of her abilities.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” my sister occasionally confesses to me. “I’m afraid.”
And in these moments, for once, I’m the big sister. I want to take my perfect counterpart under my arm and lead her to our next destination. I’m not worried. I’ve always known that we are luckier than most; we have each other. It is my turn to be certain, to take control. Because she deserves a chance to breathe. I’m not sure where we will go, but I know that wherever she is, that’s where I want to be.
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