A Short Trip to My Sister

If I could only pick one thing that the pandemic has outrageously stolen from me, I’d say it was time with my sister. Normally, during an average year, I spend months with my sister. Our time spent together during this past year can be counted using days as a metric.

A few days ago, my mother and I planned to go visit my sister. For a single weekend. That’s a ten-hour drive there and back again.

And to make matters more difficult, work was a killer the week before we were set to go. It was a veritable hell week. I was working from 8 in the morning to 7 at night; I was glued to my laptop at practically all hours of the day. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the work.

But oofs, I was burning up.

The Friday before we were set to leave, I woke up especially early to get the final bits of my work completed before the weekend. I was running on about 5 hours of sleep.

As soon as I was done, my mother and I packed ourselves into a rental car and drove over to my sister’s.

When we got there, Alya had creamy tomato soup and bread pieces waiting for us. We ate it outside on her back patio, which is easily one of the best back patios I’ve ever had the privilege to relax in.

I also got to see Ushi again!

I have missed her so much! And not being able to see her as much during the pandemic has gutted me. She’s getting a bit up there in doggie years, and it feels like the pandemic stole my time with her too.

Plus, look at that face!

After eating soup, my sister and I sang some Beatles songs together just for the heck of it, and we stayed up past midnight talking and asking each other questions. It was easily one of the best nights of my life.

I had a bit of a troubled sleep later on though, since not only had I been drinking coffee during my convo with Alya, but the pillows in the guest room are squishier than I’m used to.

I woke up to Ushi and more coffee, which made me feel better.

That morning, my mother, my sister, her husband, and I decided to take Ushi to both PetSmart and Petco. We let her pick out toys she wanted, bought her a water bowl that she actually needed, and selected some choice bones for her monching pleasure.

We went back to Alya’s house, and we gorged on Hot Cheetos Puffs while watching Muppet Treasure Island. It’s a movie we used to watch all the time as kids, and it’s only gotten better over the years.

We ordered in Chinese food for dinner and stuffed ourselves some more. Then we went to bed.

I slept terribly once again, and before the sun was even up, my mom was brightly telling me it was time to go. (At this point, I think I’ve only slept 6 hours in total while at Alya’s house.)

And just like that we were gone.

But it was worth it.

It was an incredibly short visit, so much so that it reminded me and Alya of the long ones I used to make. It sharpened our need to hang out with each other, so we’re currently planning a lengthier trip. Alya already has the vaccine since she is a teacher, and I’m in a damn-the-consequences-I-want-to-be-with-my-sister kind of mood.

She’s the one person who knows me inside and out, and you should always want to spend time with people who get you like that.

I think I passed out for the whole day after I came back. But even with practically no sleep under my belt, I’d do it all again to be with Alya.

Finally, Some Sister Time

I’ve missed my sister immensely.

People don’t always understand how close I am to my sister. Alya and I have been each other’s best friends for my entire life, and there is no shaking that kind of connection.

We’re so close, we’ve laughed at the demonstrations of sisterly affection in Frozen. Elsa and Anna are nowhere near our levels of closeness, and both Alya and I know this for a fact. “I mean,” Alya has said, “I think I love you so much, I would not be able to stop hanging out with you even if I found out I had ice powers and it might get you hurt.”

This particular analogy got tested during the pandemic.

Suddenly, both Alya and I were faced with the very real possibility that hanging out with each other could hurt us.

We held out for a good solid five months. Then, after assessing the risk and deciding we wanted to see each other more than we worried about getting sick and potentially dying, we arranged for me to stay with her for a week.

Side note: Yeah, we were hysterically morbid, about the whole thing.

I’ve been quarantining far more than Alya, so she got tested right before I arrived. That didn’t stop us from being nervous on the car drive over to her house. We asked each other about how comfortable we were wearing masks, what we should expect in the next few days, and a few other precautions.

That’s when “Bohemian Rhapsody” came on the radio.

I mean…were we just supposed to not sing it?

We belted out the lyrics with gusto, spraying who knows how much spit into the car, and we finally relaxed.

When we got back to her house, we were just engrossed with each other. I swear, it was like Christmas. I woke up in my specially made-up guest room every day excited to hang out with Alya. I spent every waking moment of my visit with her.

We exercised on her elliptical together, listening to the ultimate bop-master, TheFatRat the entire time. We drank coffee in the mornings and hung out in her backyard while her adorable pupsters, Ushi, lay down on the sidewalk next to us. We watched The Lord of The Rings, the extended editions, through to completion, quoting it at every turn and, if it was evening, taking a drink every time Sam said “Mister Frodo.” We tried reenacting the dance number from the “Genghis Khan” music video, only to find to our dismay that they actually used professional dancers in it and we couldn’t faithfully replicate their moves. We ate inadvisable amounts of Hot Cheetos Puffs with white wine in the evening. We drank Sauvignon Blanc and spent a few minutes trying to say it in exaggerated French accents. We cuddled with Ushi and gave her a bath in the middle of the day. And (suckily) we attended to our respective work schedules, too.

Ushi and I are best buds. Clearly.

That single week was seriously one of the best of my life. The threat of potentially getting sick hung over my head for the first few days, but the opportunity of just spending time with my sister (in the house, never out and about, mind you) was obliteratingly positive. Unbeknownst to me, a knot of anxiety had slowly been building up inside of me while Alya and I were apart. But when we were together, it’s like she just pulled and poked the knot away.

Upon arriving back home, it felt like I was missing something.

We have made plans for the future, a joint birthday party to which no one is invited except us and Halloween dress-up plans to look like Merry and Pippin. I look forward to seeing her again.

At the time of this writing, I just got tested for COVID-19. It felt like the smart thing to do after returning home, and I’m currently waiting for my results. I feel fine. And honestly, the test wasn’t that bad. I think my unnaturally large nasal cavities (thanks to my grotesque schnozz) have given me the capacity to have giant Q-Tips stuck in them and twirled around for samples without much discomfort.

I think people should be careful when planning visits to their family and friends at this point, as the pandemic still looms over all our heads, but I have no leg to stand on when it comes to restricting travel. I had to see Alya. However, communication is key. Be open and honest with comfort levels and risk assessments.

And I sincerely hope that everyone gets the chance to feel as happy as I did that week.

Soda Can Therapy

My sister, Alya, is one of the most beautiful persons I know. When I was younger, I seriously thought she was so gorgeous, she could be an actress if she wanted.

To this day, I’ll look at her, and it’ll blow my mind how pretty she is. Like, I know looks aren’t everything, but hot damn, my sister is breathtaking!

She has thick, wavy hair with a natural color of burnished gold. Her eyes can switch from a sea blue to a pale green to a steely grey depending on what angle you’re looking at her from (and on what color shirt she’s wearing). She exercises a lot, so she also has a fit physique, complete with trim calves and defined forearms.

Her personality is magnetizing, too.

She’s sprightly and vivacious. She boasts often because she seems to have a wellspring of confidence within her that never runs dry, but it’s always meant in good fun. One of the first dates she went on with her future husband is now a hilarious story, because she insisted she could play tennis extremely well, and when that wasn’t the case, good-natured humor ensued. Her attitude and active mind boost her good looks to the millionth degree.

But it wasn’t always this way.

My sister went through a bit of a “blossoming” phase when she was in high school. That’s when she became the person she is today.

In middle school, she was bullied terribly.

To this day, I don’t know why she was bullied. She was thin, wore glasses, and sported an unfortunate haircut, true. But she was genuinely a great kid. Smart, good-humored. But she was missing the self-confidence which she has now, and I guess that made her a target.

I’m sorry to say I wasn’t aware of her troubles then. I was making the transition to middle school as well, so I was more or less absorbed with what was going on with me. As far as I was concerned, Alya was just my knowledgeable big sister who I hung out with after school.

Alya later told me that she purposefully hid her trials from me. She didn’t want me to know that she was getting bullied. But she did admit there were times she cried before going to bed, dreading school the next day. She developed a habit of grinding her teeth in her sleep, as if she were clenching her entire body before having to dive back into the toxic atmosphere waiting for her.

There was only one time when Alya actually broke down about a situation going on at school. She and I were hanging out with our childhood friend, Mia. The three of us were each other’s closest friends, and nothing was more enjoyable than just kicking back at Mia’s grandparents house, giggling about books we had read and planning our next adventure pretending we were on Middle-Earth.

That day, we were just chugging a bunch of those mini root beers and having a burping contest.

Side note: Yes, we would have burping contests. No, we were not ashamed.

After the contest, Alya told Mia and I about this boy who had bothered her at school. I can’t for the life of me remember what the boy did. All I know was that it upset Alya almost to the point of tears. Not tears of sadness, but tears of frustration and anger.

For a while now, I had been eyeing this sledgehammer that Mia’s grandparents kept in a toolshed, and at that point I had the perfect idea. I suggested we all let off a little steam by using that sledgehammer to pound away our problems. The plentiful amount of root beer cans around us could serve as symbolic stand-ins for the objects of our ire.

Alya, Mia, and I then solemnly proceeded to heft the sledgehammer over our shoulders and then slam it down upon those teeny cans, crushing them flat. It’s a testament to how much soda we guzzled that we were able to do this more than a few times. We decided to give Alya the majority of cans to smash, but there was still enough to go around.

These days, I kind of question whether or not that was healthy for us to do. I mean, we were not shy about naming the situations or people that we were venting our pent-up rage against. Those cans were getting destroyed.

But we felt better afterwards. And that’s all there really is to it.

This soda can therapy in no way fixed Alya’s bullying problem. I can only hope that at least for that afternoon, this one moment helped her feel an ounce more in control of her situation.

Side note: I won the burping contest, I’m 90% sure. Mia and I were always the big contenders in these things. For the life of her, when Alya was young, she just could not burp. She would try, but nothing would come out.

O Sister! My Sister

Sibling rivalry is a foreign concept to me.

I do have a sibling, an older sister, but we’ve never been rivals. Psh, we’ve been the opposite of rivals.

She’s my best friend. No contest.

Her name is Alya (pronounced uh-LEE-uh), and she is about two years older than me. She doesn’t look it, and she sure doesn’t always act like it. She’s more carefree than me. Where I’m the slow, methodical, and stodgy one, she’s the buoyant, spirited, and adventurous one.

Despite our difference, we’ve always been close. We never really had friends when we were little kids, so our go-to person for fun and excitement was each other. Alya was always the “idea” person. She still is, come to think of it. I’m never bored when I’m hanging out with her because she’s always ready with a potential plan for the day. It’s as if her default setting is to be as enthusiastic as possible.

We went to San Francisco about a year ago in order to see Hamilton. It was hella awesome. (You can strike me down for using the word “hella,” if you want to.) But even though this trip involved seeing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s masterpiece of a musical, my favorite part out of the week-long trip was the drizzling morning I spent exploring the city with my sister.

We had breakfast at a diner that served fairly adequate breakfast food, and then we made our way to a coffee shop for some darkly-brewed goodness. (Alya would have gotten herself lost if it hadn’t been for me and my impeccable sense of direction.) Then we went to a furniture store and ogled at all the modern concepts for home decorating. After that, we pranced our way through the misting rain to the Disney Store, where I shamefully got suckered in to buying two Star Wars action figures (K-2SO and Poe Dameron). No matter where we went, we had a blast simply because we were in each other’s company.

From a very young age, Alya was an artistic soul. Her preschool drawings put my current attempts at sketching to shame. (I stick to adult coloring books now.) Her creativity knows no bounds. She’s an artist in her thoughts and in her actions.

Because of this, I think, she can be wonderfully messy at times. I know this is an artist stereotype, but hey, these things become stereotypes for a reason. Back when we shared a room together, I’d have to slog through piles of her dirty clothing to reach the closet. Now that we’re no longer living together, I kind of miss the mess.

When Alya was in middle school, she suffered the cruel abuses that stupid classmates decided to shoot her way. These prepubescent girls thought it was the height of cool to make fun of my sister for her roller backpack or for the baggy shorts our mother would sometimes make us wear. (Alya and I distastefully called these shorts that reached to our knees and bulged out at the hips the “Puffy Shorts.”) They would laugh at Alya as she passed them by and they would kick her backpack, leaving dusty footprints on the surface.

Girls can be utter dicks sometimes.

She never told me what she went through until we were both out of high school. I don’t think she wanted to appear weak to me. Or unhappy.

But trust my sister to turn the situation around. Almost as soon as she entered high school, she just…blossomed. There’s no other word for it. Her self-confidence skyrocketed. With some amazing inner strength, she bolstered her spirits and disdained to even think about the kind of girls who would make fun of someone else because of their clothes or their backpack.

Honestly, because of this, my sister became the most beautiful girl at school. Seriously. She was/is gorgeous. She grew into the envy of all because she became this pillar of self-esteem.

Alya is the one person who I entrust with the entirety of my being. I can be a flawed human being around her, and she can be her messed-up self as well. We can be goofy, serious, sad, relaxed, excited, scared, enraged, or content around each other, and it will always be a blast.

She’s the one person I miss constantly when she’s not near me. I can tell her anything and expect absolutely no judgment (okay, well, maybe some judgment, but it’s an acceptable level). Plus, it’s impossible to lie to her because she knows me so well.

Her happiness gives me happiness, and I’m certain she feels the same way about me. There’s so much comfort knowing that someone cares about you that much, knowing that someone will always believe in you even when you don’t believe in yourself.

So sibling rivalry? Impossible for me and Alya. How can I be rivals with someone who only wants the best for me?