Dear sibling,

I’ll start by saying that I love you to death. Even with us being years apart in age, I would never have gotten to where I am today without you. We have been opposites since birth. You came out of the womb singing and dancing, and I came out quiet with my head always tucked in my book. As we’ve grown older, I’ve realized that maybe this isn’t such a bad thing.

Don’t get me wrong — growing up with you was a struggle. In the car, you would ask our parents to crank up the radio so you could sing your favorite Celine Dion song. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except for the fact that I was sitting right next to you trying to enjoy my book in the quiet of the car.

You always wanted to do my hair and makeup. It was cute at first, but the cuteness factor went away real fast the first time you burnt my face with that curling iron….and boy oh boy did I cry! The makeup was the challenging part. If someone saw you with your plethora of brushes, they probably would have thought that you worked at MAC. Sadly for me, you did not. I’d come upstairs to surprise Mom and the eyeshadow would be as purple as you could get it, and all the way up to my eyebrows. As for my lipstick, you always happened to find mom’s darkest red that she tried to hide from us upstairs in the bathroom. She did this because half of the tube always ended up across my face and sometimes even on my nose. That didn’t ever really matter to us, though, because you had so much fun doing it!

As you got older, you started to realize that the girls your age across the street were a lot more fun than I was. You would still try to include me, but some stuff was more adventurous when your little sibling didn’t tag along. When mom got me my first little Barbie Jeep, I couldn’t help but brainstorm ideas to where you and your friends could come and play with me. That’s when you had the ingenious idea of strapping on your roller blades and holding on to the back of my Jeep. It was such a blast. The wind hitting us in the face, and the struggle of this tiny little jeep making it up the monstrous hill known as our driveway. It felt like time had stopped when we were hanging out.

As you got older, you started changing. You wore clothes that were considered the “style” for that week and you packed on the makeup… especially the black eyeliner. I never understood why you did that because I always thought you looked beautiful how you were. As I grew older, I started putting makeup on. I packed on the black eyeliner and put on the latest weekly fashion and in that moment, I realized why you had done it all along.

When I got into high school, my world got busy. I fell in love for the first time, got my first job and started to play what is now my favorite sport, golf. My world was swamped with all of the excitement of new things that were happening in my life. With all of this good happening, the bad followed. I rarely got to see you anymore. I often thought of the lipstick smudged across my face and how included I felt because you never let me feel like anything less than what I was.

To my polar opposite, I will never fully understand what you’re thinking. I’ll never understand how I can be hot and you can be cold, how you can be salt and I can be pepper or how two people can be completely opposite yet still love each other to death. To my sister, I will always be here for you and will always love you more than you know.

Sincerely,

A.P.