Sisterhood.

Building a snowman.

In 2016 my sister Katherine and I walked briskly down the street in Manhattan, past Julliard and onto the plaza at Lincoln Center. I felt a bit like a witch in my graduation robes but we waited together for our parents to catch up. Naturally, they wanted to take more pictures of my big day. We had done the same for my sister who had finished law school just a week earlier, her witch cap and gown much fancier than mine. It was much different from our high school graduation where we’d both been dressed in white and adorning flower crowns, making the obvious joke that this felt a bit more like some sort of virgin sacrifice ceremony, sending us out into the world for slaughter. But there I was four years later, a little banged up but certainly not slaughtered. 

At Christmas time that same year, my mother recounted that moment saying, “I was watching the two of you strut through New York side by side and I thought… the two of you will be alright once we’re gone,” she said, referring to my father and herself. “And it made me so happy.” 

In 2017 only four days before I was meant to move to my sister’s city to live with her for a summer contract job, I found myself in an unusually hostile confrontation where she loudly exclaimed that I was always ruining her life and it was our parents who just assumed she’d be okay with me sleeping on her couch for a few months and forced this situation upon her without thinking of her comfort. With twice the amount of vitriol but half the volume, I said I didn’t need her and four days later rolled up to a motel outside the city with my backpack, a duffle bag, an intense feeling of loneliness, and a bone-deep acceptance that in this life my sister was not to be relied on for anything of significance.

Growing up, it did not take all that long to realize that Katherine being five years older than me put just enough distance between us that she would find me a pain to be around. Of course, after realizing this, I went from wanting to be like her to instead going out of my way to say the most outrageous things I could think of whenever I caught up to her and her friends like rambling about space invasions, torture techniques, or highly obscure Star Wars topics. But that was when we were young. We were also still young, relatively speaking, when our other notably heated argument got triggered by me saying her sorority sisters were fake sisters, and that she shouldn’t be going on and on about sisterhood when she’s got a real sister she doesn’t care about at all. In hindsight, that was an unnecessary instigation on my part but was indicative of how the nature of our relationship with each other made me feel by the time I was in high school and she was in college.

So in 2024 when word spread that I’d secured my third contract job in her city to date, I was bewildered when she texted me saying that one of her law school friends would be hosting her annual summer solstice backyard BBQ and that she wanted to bring me along because her friends had heard all about me and have been waiting for an opportunity to meet me. 

“You talk about me to your friends?” I asked. 

“Of course I do,” she said. 

Carrying the scar of an argument from seven years ago in the way my friend tells me only a Scorpio can, I agreed to the invitation with no small amount of suspicion. But as the date grew closer, I felt myself getting a little nervous. For the first time in my entire life, Katherine wanted me to spend time with her and her friends with no parents in sight to please at thirty and thirty-five years old respectively.

Meeting at her apartment to watch part of a soccer game before the party is my first time in her space since getting a quick glance at her freshman college dorm. Unsurprisingly, it’s very messy with clothes, cosmetic products, books, and craft supplies everywhere. It’s all very gray but smells of scented candles. I sit on the couch adjacent to her and begin contributing to the commentary about the match as she works on her latest crochet project. Internally, I puzzle more over how bizarre I am finding this moment.

Katherine hates anyone who isn’t her cat occupying her space. She won’t even have random Tinder dates come back to her dwelling, choosing instead to spend the night in the bed of an unknown man. But I also think about how her life has changed over the past few years. The passion that landed her in law school in the first place had faded, she’d been desperately trying to get a new job at a place that was more in line with her interests but has had no success, all of her friends had gotten married, she’d traveled to several countries around the world in organized travel group tours, and she’d watched one of her closest friends from her law school days die rather quickly after a cancer diagnosis that came too late. This wasn’t the same Katherine from 2017. Not really.

But in the end, I internally doubled down on what I felt deeply to be true: I simply cannot trust her when it really counts, even if I wanted to. And so this time we were spending together was little more than a well-rehearsed performance. I was very familiar with performance, after all. 

It turns out that the party was exceedingly normal. The natural flow of the group conversation inevitably ended up with me re-telling stories from my time on the road, even the most mundane of which seemed to captivate my newfound audience. Not a week later, the host of the party and her husband accompanied my sister to visit the event I’d been working on and we walked around the festival site for a good three hours before they went on their way. Until that day, my sister had never come out to see anything I’d ever worked on, not even the times I’d lived and done work in her city just a handful of blocks away from where she worked.

Now in my final days of the two of us being in the same metropolitan area, I have been invited to yet another party hosted by one of her friends and I’m honestly quite beside myself with shock. 

“The two of you have matured,” my mother says when I mention how unusual I find this situation. “You need to understand that Katherine is very proud of you,” she says not for the first time. I have nothing to offer in response except doubt. After all, this is the same person who said I ruined her life, who wasn’t worth nearly as much as random girls in her sorority, who never reached out to me about anything when I was in town whether I was living in a motel room or a dodgy efficiency room above a bar, who said she wouldn’t want me anywhere near her hypothetical wedding, who considers me to be a complete freak and never said anything remotely close to “sorry” about any of it. 

“She likes my resume,” I say, alluding to the big concert stories her friends had been so captivated by. 

“She loves you,” my mother insists before adding, “Holding a grudge is not the Jedi way.” 

It’s silly, I know. For someone who talks quite a bit about the importance of bonds between women, it’s laughable that my insides turn to wood around my own flesh and blood sister. 

It would be nice if this summer was the start of something new. I just can’t believe that it is. So in that sense, even if I can observe that in some ways she has changed, I haven’t. I suppose that means the ball is in my court and I have a little more growing up to do.