Under the Same Sky

Always Under the Same Sky

We met when we were six, which is a strange age to find a sister.

Not the kind born into your family.

The kind the universe slips into your life and quietly refuses to take back.

I don't remember exactly when she stopped being my friend and started being my family. There wasn't a ceremony for it. No paperwork. No dramatic declaration. Just thousands of ordinary moments stacked on top of one another until there was no daylight left between the words.

Friend.

Sister.

Home.

At some point they became the same thing.

Through decades of mistakes, marriages, children, heartaches, funerals, celebrations, disasters, and all the ridiculous decisions humans make when they're trying desperately to be loved, Susie remained exactly where she'd always been.

There.

Not fixing things.

Not rescuing.

Just there.

The world talks a lot about soulmates. It talks less about witnesses.

Susie is my witness.

She remembers versions of me that no longer exist.

The little girl who thought she could save everyone.

The teenager who mistook surviving for living.

The woman who keeps trying to stitch broken things back together with sheer determination.

She has seen every one of them.

And somehow stayed.

That is rarer than love.

When life knocks the breath out of me, she's one of the people I call. Not because she tells me what I want to hear. In fact, she usually doesn't.

When I told her I wanted to be cruel to someone who had hurt me, she didn't hand me a weapon.

She handed me a mirror.

"It's not truly in your nature to hurt people you've shared your heart with."

A stranger hears wisdom in those words.

I hear thirty years of observation.

Susie knows something I continually forget. Anger burns hot in me, but cruelty never lasts. Even when people earn it. Even when part of me wishes I were built differently.

She knows the difference.

That knowledge can only come from years spent watching the same soul fight itself.

People assume the strongest friendships are built on similarities.

Ours was built on endurance.

Life pulled us in different directions over and over again. Different houses. Different states. Different responsibilities. Different tragedies.

Yet somehow every road eventually found its way back to the same conversation.

The same laughter.

The same certainty.

When everything else changes, some people become landmarks.

She became one of mine.

When we were children, we used to lie on our backs and stare at the night sky. We would talk about how the stars connected us. There were three stars that made a triangle, and for reasons only children can truly understand, we decided it was meant for us.

Me.

Susie.

And a boy whose name I think was Nick, though after all these years I am no longer completely sure. Time has a way of swallowing details.

That part makes me sad.

My childhood exists mostly in flashes now. Small pieces of light surrounded by years I can't always reach. Faces. Places. Feelings. Moments. Sometimes I can remember what happened but not when. Sometimes I can remember the feeling but not the details.

But I remember those stars.

I remember lying in the grass looking up at them.

I remember believing that no matter where life took us, we'd always be connected because we'd be under the same sky.

Maybe that's why Susie's words hit me so hard all these years later.

"You may not be here, but we are always under the same sky."

The moment she said it, I was six years old again.

The older I get, the more I realize that home isn't always a place. Sometimes home is a voice at the other end of a message telling you to put your bare feet on the earth and scream at the sky if that's what it takes.

Sometimes home is somebody reminding you that another person's choices aren't yours to carry.

Sometimes home is a woman who loves you enough to tell you when you're romanticizing your own pain.

The thing I treasure most about Susie isn't that she takes my side.

It's that she takes my future's side.

Even when those are different things.

When I was drowning in what-ifs, she reminded me that the past only offers two things:

Pain.

And imagination.

The fantasy that this time things would've been different.

The fantasy that old wounds would've somehow learned not to bleed.

The fantasy that unfinished stories owe us better endings.

She refused to let me live there.

Instead she gave me a sentence I suspect I'll carry for the rest of my life.

"You may not be here, but we are always under the same sky."

Such a simple thing.

Yet somehow large enough to contain years.

Distance shrinks when viewed through that lens.

Maine.

Wisconsin.

A thousand miles.

Eighteen hundred miles.

It doesn't matter.

There is only one sky.

One moon.

One collection of stars that have watched two little girls grow old enough to have grandchildren, scars, regrets, wisdom, and stories.

We stand beneath all of it.

Together.

I think that's what family actually is.

Not blood.

Not obligation.

Not shared names.

Family is the person who keeps showing up long after they have every reason not to.

The person who remembers who you are when you've forgotten.

The person who sees your worst moments and never mistakes them for your whole story.

I've had many friends in my life.

A next to no loves.

More than my share of heartbreak.

But only one Suzie.

And after all these years, after all the miles, all the mistakes, all the people who came and went, she remains exactly what she was when we were children.

My sister.

Just not by blood.

By choice.

By time.

By survival.

By love.

And by the quiet certainty that no matter where life sends either of us, we will always be standing beneath the same sky.