There are few girls who are lucky to say they have both a younger and older sister, me being one of them. Growing up, I always looked up to my older sister. While she is really my half sister and more than ten years older than me, I consider her my real sister, but also my role model, my inspiration, and my best friend. Whether it was my first day of high school, first time driving, first bad grade, or first boyfriend… She had already experienced it all. She always knew exactly what to say, and knows me better than I know myself. Because she lived in California and I lived in Connecticut, I only saw her over holidays or in the summer, but nonetheless, our phone calls would go on for hours. It wasn’t until last summer when I was visiting her in California that she showed me a poem she wrote in 2004 when I was 6 years old entitled “Holding You”. One part in particular struck me:
“I find it funny that I am the girl you aspire to be/And I don’t know if you will understand, not sure if you can see,/I was holding you, but really you were holding me”.
Twelve years later, it is strange to think that I may have benefitted my role model, because in a sense that works against its definition. All of a sudden I realized that my long distance calls made her day as well. While I looked up to her, she saw me as a light in her day, which in a way supported her just the same. This poem made me realize how I not only serve as a younger sister but an older sister as well. My younger sister is only four years younger than me and because she acts incredibly independent and because we are so close in age I never really thought that she looked up to me. But now, she is back home starting high school in Connecticut and I am in California starting college, she is the one calling me whether to show me the dance she learned this week, to complain, or to simply to tell me she’s wearing my shirt or in my room. While she may still not admit she misses me, these calls make my day. Now all of a sudden, I am the big sister in California that she will only see on holidays and in the summer. And like my older sister, I know that while she looks up to me, there are so many things I see in her that I aspire to be: confident, carefree, and have a knack for math. Again, while she thinks I am “holding” her, she is “holding” me together just as much.
