Rewind to June 28, 2012: my older sister, Katie, and I waved goodbye to our family at Newark Airport, giddy with excitement for what was ahead of us. After months of planning, booking hotels, pooling graduation money, and piecing together safe and coherent itineraries, we were finally heading west, to Los Angeles, stopping there before we headed far east to Asia, and then ultimately, to Europe, and then back home again. Seven weeks total.
I had a few worries about going away so far for so long; I was worried I’d be homesick, I was nervous about remembering to take my malaria pills in India, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that one of my worries was spending seven whole weeks with my older sister. Don’t get me wrong; for the most part we get along fine. But I couldn’t for the life of me remember a time that I spent this long alone with anyone, and this surely would be the most time I’d spent with my sister since we were little, before summer camps and school away from home. My fear, as it turns out, wasn’t for naught.
Boy, we squabbled, and even reduced one another to tears from time to time. Being alone together meant having each other’s back when it came to pickpockets, crabby immigration officers, and always making sure passports and boarding passes were safely in hand, but it also meant spending every waking minute together, and this was taxing.
Around less than two weeks into our time alone together we were staying at a quiet hotel in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand. One day, we woke up early to attend a cooking class to learn how to make authentic Thai food. After almost seven hours of cooking and eating, we were exhausted, but instead of going straight back to our hotel, we decided to push it a little bit and stop at a famed temple on the way home.
Well, we never made it inside. Instead, we stationed ourselves across the street at a construction site and just fought like overtired, overstuffed sisters are wont to do. I can’t even remember what the argument was about, but the Thai construction workers sure got an earful, and a sight as I remember Katie channeling our mother and gritting her teeth. I do believe she threw an umbrella at me before we climbed into a taxi and rode back in silence. It was this day that we wrote up a contract that we would refer to for the rest of the trip, a contract forbidding things like fighting at tourist attractions and throwing umbrellas at one another.The next day, we did make it inside the temple, and wasn’t it ironic when inside we were faced with The Presiding Buddha Image: a statue in a “preventing relatives from fighting posture”?
Believe it or not, we even fought on the plane coming home. At this point, we chalked it up to being at once jet-lagged, travel weary, homesick, and real sick, and there is no doubt that all of these factors make your patience paper thin.
By then, however, this hardly mattered. Because while spending all this time with one person can be taxing, it can also be really wonderful. I said goodnight and good morning to Katie everyday for seven weeks. She was the best planner and organizer I could have asked for, booking the most delicious cooking classes and taking me to the most amazing markets. She brought me soup when I had a fever in Paris, and she gave me medicine when I had tummy trouble in Delhi.
She’s just three years older than I am, only 21 to my 18, and even though we took on many responsibilities this trip required together, I still looked up to her as we navigated planes, trains, and automobiles all around the world. I’m not saying we didn’t have our travel mishaps and those I-can’t-believe-we-survived-that moments, because believe me, those happened. I’m just saying that when it was raining and we were making our way down a steep mountain with no guardrails in Rishikesh, India, I could reach out to hold my sister’s hand, and it was there.
We’ve learned a lot about each other since that first plane ride in June, and we’ve grown, not only as individuals, but also as sisters. This is a farewell tribute to her because in two weeks, she is leaving. She’s headed west to California again, to San Francisco this time, but she’s staying, and she is putting down roots in a city that means very much to our family: it is where our parents met and it is where Katie and I were born.
I’ll miss her, and I’ll cry when she leaves, but they will be different tears than ones I’ve cried before. Tears because I know her inside and out and love her for what I know. I know she’ll be happy there, and after spending probably the best seven weeks of my life so far with her, I’ve come to think of her happiness as my own, because as sisters you realize it is something to be cherished and shared.
