The Sister Dance

My sister and I had always been close in one way or another. As we grew up, it was mostly in proximity, sharing a bedroom together. Ironically that was also the time we were the farthest apart, constantly fighting throughout high school.

I remember coming home one day to find that she had ‘moved out’ of our bedroom and squeezed her bed into the corner of the study that was almost like a big closet. I felt completely rejected and so sad…sure we fought a lot and she was older and wanted her own life without a nagging little sister, but I later realized I cared more about her acceptance than anyone’s. I had held her on a pedestal since I was born.

When she got to college, she loved it so much that she told me I just had to come to the same school so we could hang out. What? Really? Whatever part of me that was still hanging on to hurt decided to do my own thing and went to another school, specifically to not follow in her footsteps for once.

So we did this dance as sisters. We were never not close, even when it felt like it could possibly be out of sibling obligation more than a deep connection with each other, but we weren’t what I would call close either.

Our parents felt it and decided to give us an opportunity to go exploring together and see what might happen if we had the special opportunity to adventure through France and Italy as sisters. I was living in England after university and she was living in Chicago. We began our trip in Paris and oh what a time we had!

I converted her into a coffee drinker as we stopped for cappuccinos several times throughout each day, every café more idilic than the last. We carried the stinkiest cheese from Paris to Nice and “refrigerated” it on the window ledge until we had a little wine and cheese picnic. We bought a tiny bottle of absinthe and waited with great anticipation to see if she’d see little green fairies after taking a sip, only to realize that the recipe has changed since the 1920s…so much for the bohemian psychedelic experience we were expecting!

We got caught in a huge rain storm while hiking between the Italian villages of Cinque Terre and walked into a cafe gushing water from our hair, clothes, and shoes. A couple of kind, local men helped us get settled in the neighboring restaurant and brought us dry shirts to change into and a space heater to warm up. Just as my sister took a sip of wine, I wondered where these shirts had come from and pictured two men sitting naked in the café next store. I burst out laughing and she nearly spit her wine out…oh we laughed so so so hard and she didn’t even know why because I was laughing too hard to speak this image I had.

That could have been the week where we bonded in a new way. We had so many lovely moments on that trip…and some challenging ones too. She took the most beautiful photographs along the way, training to shoot for National Geographic. We bought leather journals in Florence and knowing my love for writing, she bought me a blown glass fountain pen and ink. It was so thoughtful, very special.

When she called me some months later with a question, I shrieked as she asked if I’d be her maid of honor! “You’re engaged! And you want me to be your maid of honor!!” The little sister in me was overwhelmed with appreciation for what this meant. My big sister chose me. Wow!

Our dance as sisters continued. We were not not close, and actually were much closer than before. We were still just so different, really going on our own paths. Unexpectedly, I was the first to move away. I think the whole family thought it would always be her. She was always the creative one, the adventurous one, the one who would defy conventions, start her own trends, let her imagination run wild and free. I was the perfectionist, the rule follower, the disciplined one. Oh if the girl I was then only knew what she would get into in the future!

So I moved first, out to the mountains of Colorado. As serendipity would have it, she and her husband moved to Colorado a while later for a job. It was there that they made me an aunt! I’m not sure there’s anything more than a super cute, precious baby to bring people together. She was there for me during my own massive life change too, in the form of a devastating break up. But just like that, they moved to California and I felt that familiar feeling of abandonment.

The break up had stirred something inside me though. I turned to my journal to listen to me and process with me. I wrote and wrote and committed to falling in love with myself before falling in love with any thing or any one ever again. I looked at my whole life and wondered…where am I going if I keep going in this direction? Who am I and what am I here for?

I decided I would transform it all, my whole life. I didn’t know my purpose, what I was meant to be doing, but I was devoted to finding it. I spent months and months exploring my mind and emotions, my energy, relationships, dreams, passions, my body…every part of my life was up for grabs. I sold my house, my car, most of my things; I quit my corporate job and bought a flight to Argentina.

I would go on an adventure, a literal hero’s journey, to find what turned me off and what turned me on, what I was afraid of and what I was capable of. I would fall in love with myself, find my purpose, and write all about it. And this is what I prepared to do. By putting my attention on myself and my journey and choosing myself first, a door opened.

It was like this older sister of mine who I had always adored and looked up to, was now looking up to me. She saw me as bold, she saw my courage, she witnessed the transformation that happened in me before I even left. She even tolerated me when I shared stories that, more often than not, started with, “Now I know this sounds a bit woo woo, but…”.

I felt closer to her than ever, like the sister relationship I had always wanted…and I was moving to another hemisphere. We decided we would turn this into its own creative adventure between us. We bought a little black leather-bound book and wrote about who we were and what our little project was all about.

Our plan was to go back to the days of hand written letters and sending them by mail, waiting in anticipation for the next one to arrive, and we would do it in this notebook. We would take turns having the book and sharing whatever we felt inspired to share…drawings, ideas, stories, advice, dreams, travel momentos. In the front cover, we filled in the info:

In case of loss, please return to: two sisters sharing this travel inspired opportunity to grow together…farther apart but closer than ever

As a reward: $ …great karma, great stories, and $20,000

She cried when we hugged good bye. Wow, she was really feeling the enormity of this! That was almost enough to make me second guess leaving. I was taking the leap for my purpose, but I had wanted us to be close like this my whole life. I had our little notebook tucked away though, and it felt like a treasure chest waiting to be filled.

I was the first to write and I poured my stories onto the page about my missteps with learning Spanish and what I was finding and experiencing in Argentina. I wrote about a day that we would spend together if she came to visit, wandering through the cobbled streets of the Sunday market in the edgy neighborhood of San Telmo in Buenos Aires.

It always felt like a leap of faith, sending our book off in the mail, hoping it would make it across all the borders and find each other safely. I think it cost $18 just to send it the first time…almost as much as the notebook itself. Of course, it quickly became priceless to us. It felt like our own little secret, like a super power only sisters could share.

As I continued to move from country to country, it took a lot of hope and serendipity to have this notebook arrive to wherever my ‘home’ happened to be at the time. I would wait patiently and with great anticipation, tuning into knowing that it was too magical to not succeed in its one task, to make it through international mail. And it always did.

…Until it didn’t.

We stayed patient. We believed that if we believed in it enough, it would arrive. We even made a game of the waiting…telling each other stories of the adventure our little black book was having, the hands it was passing through, the adventures it was on. We knew it would find us. But as the story goes…weeks turned into months. I was moving on to Colombia and the notebook was still somewhere en route to Argentina.

At one point, I let myself dream that she was teasing me and was going to show up unexpectedly to deliver it by hand, but the notebook didn’t show up and neither did she. It felt strange and unfinished, like a movie stopping abruptly in the middle. The joy of imagining where it was and what it was up to wore off. We called each other and we sent emails. I eventually came back to the US just after I became an aunt for the second time. The our beautiful book became a faded memory.

And then one day I get a phone call and it was my sister. This time she was shrieking before she could even say anything. She finally squeaked out, “You’re never going to believe this! Someone found our notebook!!” I was sooo excited! It felt like we had received an actual message in a bottle. Someone actually found it and sought us out? Wow! How beautiful to know there are wonderful, kind people in the world!

And then she delivered the real ‘you’re not going to believe this’ news. Her voice was shaking as she said, “The woman who found it was traveling and saw it on a bookshelf in a hostel in Argentina. She tracked me down through what we wrote on the inside cover and that’s where she saw our reward offer: great karma, great stories, and $20,000. It turns out that her sister works for a publisher. They flipped through it and were so touched and entertained by what they saw in us …hey, they want to give us $20,000 to turn it into a published book and they want to fly us to Argentina to have that day in Buenos Aires together that you wrote about!”

Commence sister shrieking, jumping up and down!

And so here we are, two sisters, sipping cappuccinos at the market in San Telmo, laughing and trading stories of all the adventures we’ve had and all the adventures to come. We’ll wander the market and find a new notebook to write in together. We’ll playfully create a new reward in case our creative correspondence goes off on an adventure of its own again, all the while knowing our journey as sisters has been the true reward.