Up until recently, I thought that since my younger sister and I are four years apart in age, we’d never truly be able to connect.

Because she’s so much younger, I felt that she would never really understand anything within the scheme of my life and its problems. When we were younger, we constantly fought and it’d drive my mother insane, but things seemed to have changed since the days of us pulling each other’s hair at the dinner table.

During the year before my departure from my familiar home life to a fresh start in college, I began to realize just how important my relationship with my sister is and that I should never take it for granted.

Throughout the ups and downs of life, we experience many moments worth celebrating as well as those worth some grieving. Up until this point in my life, my sister has sat backseat for all of my life’s greatest stages, and it’s very foreign to now know a world where she isn’t physically there to experience it all with me.

Being so far away, I simply can’t just scream across the hall and ask if she’s down for late-night-eats, or if she’d kindly get off our Netflix account so I won’t have to surrender to whatever’s playing on cable.

I know it’s cliche, but just because I’ve started a new chapter of my life doesn’t mean I’ll forget about one of the main characters. Although texting and talking on the phone isn’t nearly as fun as actually being together, no one could ever compete with the strength of the relationship that we’ve so effortlessly created.

Although there certainly have been instances when it felt like the only reasonable thing to do was to rip my sister’s head off, it’s all out of love. I know that no matter how weird, clingy and annoying I may be - my sister can definitely attest to this - at the end of the day we’ll still be there for each other because that’s what sisters do.

It took me a long time to realize that being given a sister is the best gift my parents have ever given me. In all honesty, the responsibility of acting as a role model - as well as a lifelong playmate - has provided me with so many of my best qualities and has helped me define myself as a person as I’ve grown older.

So, shoutout to my mom and dad for giving me Sammy, the light of my life, and the person that taught me that laughter is always the answer.

Although she’s only fourteen, I’m already so proud of the person she is becoming.

Now that we’re older, there’s no person I would have rather laughed, cried, and grown up with all these years. My sister knows me better than anyone on this earth and knowing that she’ll be there for me no matter what is part of what motivates me every single day, and what makes those weekend visits home that much sweeter.