It's September 1, 2016 and I'm at my laptop writing again. I have this idea for an article but it's just not coming together. I've been sitting here for a good half hour and all I've written besides this is half a sentence. I need a cookie break.
It's still September 1. That was a good cookie. My dad sent it to me from my home in Phoenix. I'm at the end of my second week of college at Valparaiso University, and as I was eating that cookie just now, I realized why I couldn't write my article. I miss my sister, and my thoughts keep wandering away from my work to her recently braces-free smile and wildly expressive eyes.
It's September 4, 2016. I'm glad I got a head-start on my writing this week because I'm still stuck.
Whenever I hear the word "stuck" or the saying "between a rock and a hard place," an image comes to my mind from a time when I was about about to be 11, and my mom took my sister and I on a cross-country road trip. We were in Indiana visiting my dad's cousin at the jewelry store she worked for at the time. Inside, Sophia and I were immediately drawn not to the sterile glass cases glittering with bling and clean white, but to a medium-sized fish tank in the corner. Sophia was about six or seven, and as we watched the fish, I noticed her clear blue eyes widen to take it all in, and I felt myself falling into that mini-scape just as much as she was—for a moment, the three-and-a-half years between us disappeared.
We looked back and forth at the most vivid of the fish, but then we spotted—to our sudden delight—a little stingray. The stingray relentlessly flapped its “wings” up against the side of the tank, trying to swim to the water’s surface but falling back to the sand over and over again. Sophia and I took up a comical personification, narrating the stingray’s thoughts with dramatic inflection: “Oops, I’ll try again! Oops, I’ll try again!” And then when the giggles wore out (though the stingray pressed on with her quest), we discovered a bumpy blue starfish at the far edge of the tank by the wall, obscured from view at most angles. The starfish had four arms stuck to the lava rock in the tank, and the last arm folded all the way over, stuck to the glass tank wall less than an inch away. We were overwhelmed by the cuteness of a little starfish wedged in a crack, just sort of loafing. He looked not like he was uncomfortably stuck, but like he was comfortably situated and intended to stay for a while. I’ll never forget her squeal of delight when I pointed out that starfish, or her repetition of the stingray’s persistent and mopey lament.
Sophia and I have laughed a lot over the years, about anything and everything. We once had an involved “debate” about whether or not she could successfully amass an extensive collection of two-dollar bills without my intervention. While my mother was driven to insanity after twenty minutes of this conversation, we were in stitches. One time Sophia accidentally spit flourless chocolate cake onto the ground from a raised barstool in our kitchen while she tried to prove me wrong about something, which immediately transformed our pretended conflict into teary laughter. I’ve never had more delicious grapes than the ones I ate with Sophia one summer day at the dining table—as we took turns eating and savoring one grape at a time, each of us categorized the grape with one of a few recurring adjectives. “Sweet,” she would say, finger poised before her and eyes closed in deep analytical thought. At my turn, I would tilt my head and fix my line of vision on a patch on the wall, then at last break her suspense: “tart!” And then back to her—the same theatrical charade—and she suddenly exclaimed, “SQUISHY!” We dissolved into merry laughter once again, the kind that makes your stomach and jaw hurt and yet you don’t want to stop, ever.
Sophia is hilarious and at times poignant, serious, and deeply perceptive. She’s all of these things at once. One time she stood before our family, refusing to lounge on the couch with us as a protest to our teasing—and then when someone caved and apologized for razzing her, she said, with the pointy-lipped pout only she can create and an equally piteous voice, “Yeah, but whenever you make a joke, a little bit of truth slips out.” And then she dove toward dad and curled up amidst a hodgepodge of laughs and “aww’s” and “I love you’s” and cuddles and tickles that make our house into a home…
It’s September 9, 2016, and I’m sitting in the student union at Valpo, the campus fish-tank in my periphery. I’ve missed my deadline for submitting my article because as I read through for a final edit, I got lost thinking about Sophia’s curly hair which she’s currently growing out for a Halloween costume two years out, and her scowl when you’ve infuriated her, which can conjure even the most stubborn of consciences…and her sweeping, full-body movements when she knows she’s seized your attention, and how she never just talks to someone—she performs. And how when company comes she gets energized to the point of performing kitchen parkour, and how every time she passes one of our cats she sweeps him up and talks to him like it’s the first time in her life she’s seen a cat and she’s absolutely beside herself with delight! And how she hugs me so hard that I’ve lost hope of ever having a full set of in-tact ribs, and how even when I snap at her to stop touching me or my stuff she still comes back to talk or cuddle again.
This is not the article I tried to write last weekend but I guess what I’m saying is that I love Sophia a whole bunch and even though I feel like I belong here at Valpo, and nothing has ever felt so right, I miss that munchkin more than that stingray wanted to swim to the top of that tank.
Sophia, if you see this, remember that I love you more than dad’s flourless chocolate cake, more than green grapes, more than cute starfish—even more than I love Hamilton: An American Musical—and I can’t wait for you to visit me in October. You are my sunshine.
