My sisters are probably the greatest gift that I have ever been given, and I genuinely do not know where I would be in life without my sisters.
I have two younger sisters, one who’s 17 and another who’s 13, and while we didn’t always get along when we were little, now that we are older, we are what I would consider to be the best of friends.
Growing up, we were moving schools and states a lot, and for a time, we really only had each other, since friends were always coming in and out of our lives. We lived in the suburbs outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma, for eight years, and then the woods in Texas for almost four, and eventually the suburbs in Oregon.
We spent our time creating new games together in our rooms with our toys, running around the woods creating forts and tree huts, biking as far as our little eyes could see, and when we got bored, we’d fight over silly things like who was stronger and who took whose toy.
For the longest time, though, my sisters were just the annoying little people who followed me around. I rolled my eyes when they imitated me, and I would scold them like my mom would when they’d make little mistakes. I always said they were trying to bug me and my friends when I had them over, but now, looking back, they just wanted to hang out with their cool older sister.
As we grew older, and the hormones were changing at different rates, we’d fight a lot more over even more nonsense. We’d lock ourselves in our rooms, or we’d argue and yell over whose wearing whose shirt, but slowly, after a while, we started to fight a little less and started understanding each other more.
Playing games with our toys turned into shopping trips and gossip sessions over smoothies or coffee, and boredom fights turned into movie nights and late-night baking sessions. Eventually, we realized how close we really are, and how much we needed each other.
When life started to get real, we began to lean on each other much more, and those annoying little sisters I used to see became the two people I rely on most in life when anything happens. Good, bad, or boring, my sisters are always the first to know.
Now that I’m almost 3,000 miles away from them, I would give anything to be with them. While I love my home away from home at Bonaventure, I forget that the price I pay is watching them celebrate their milestone moments from afar. I begin to cherish those little mundane moments we used to share in childhood, and I look forward to the lives we’ll create as we get older.