I am number 2. Not because I'm second best at anything specifically but in a sequence much more important to me. I am the second of four daughters in my family, meaning I have three sisters; my sisters are three of the greatest people that I have the privilege of knowing and growing up with. In so many ways, they have helped me become myself. I pull the best and brightest aspects from who they are and emulate it until its a part of me too. Without them, I wouldn't know up from down, but most importantly they have taught me the importance of true friendship, which I have found in them for the last nineteen years.

The four of us live by the sister code: lie until you die. While it might sound like a negative thing - us proudly proclaiming that we tell false truths - our little catchphrase is about so much more than "covering" for one another. Especially since coming into our teenage years, these few words have meant loyalty to the sisterhood we share. Our bond is trustworthy and dependable. No matter what the situation, even as children, we protect each other first and fiercely.

Another powerful trait of our friendships is that my sisters and I seem to share a telepathic wavelength. From Georgia to New Jersey to Alabama to New York, come this fall the Shirkey girls are officially all apart from one another. While I'm scared by this thought, I'm comforted in knowing that even from miles away one of them will call with a joke at just the right moment as they always do. Being away at school this past year, I was afraid that I would lose that immediate ability to help make a bad day better and to have my bad days made better. What I found instead was the exact opposite.

I distinctly remember a week where I was incredibly stressed about an upcoming chemistry exam. That Wednesday, with my exam only two days away, I was nearing a panic when my youngest sister called to tell me she missed me. "I just felt like you might want to know," she said. Within the next hour, both of my other sisters called as well, telling me that they too just felt like they should check in on me. The empathy and support that I receive from my best friends is so much more than an obligation from our bloodline. In days such as those, we prove to each other that we chose each other as sisters in addition to the great luck we have in actually being sisters.

The greatest strength of our friendship, however, isn't even in our friendships themselves; it comes from the fact that all of us are completely different from one another. I know that I can rely on my sisters for anything that I need from them, but I also know that I get to experience adventures I would never take on my own because of them. From little things like buying a top that I wouldn't have chosen for myself to some life-altering decisions like being encouraged to apply to colleges far from home, my sisters can see what's good for me before I can. My partners in crime, my dance party partners, my real life mirror, my best friends. I have too many words to describe this relationship, but as far as why I'm grateful to call them my BFFs? I know that wherever I am, they have my back from hundreds of miles away, just like I do for them.