There are people that we meet and they stick in your mind right from the start. One of those moments for me was when I was four years old and attending pre-school. The person that I remember the most is not someone I was particularly close to at the time, in fact our love story wouldn't begin until more than ten years later, but there she is, clear as day in my mind's eye. The girl with the long brown hair flowing behind her, big blue eyes and freckles. She liked a boy named Chad and they would ride bikes and trikes together in the basement of the church where nursery school took place. I knew this girl was not like the other girls. She knew something the rest of us didn't quite comprehend yet. I also knew that this knowledge was somehow connected to her ability at four years old to flip her hair effortlessly while her smile beamed forth.
Ten years later we were enrolled at the same school once again, this time high school. She still was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen and I was finally starting to figure out the whole hair-flipping/beaming smile thing and the power that it possessed. I can't recall exactly how or when but by the end of tenth grade we were best friends.
Three years later when I was living in Denver she came out to live with me for a summer. We were 19. We were were brand new and shiny. Our whole lives ahead of us. We laughed together when my roommate at the time began to reveal more and more that she was a tad odd (quick example - leaving her dead pet goldfish out on the kitchen to dry out with no more explanation than that was what she was doing). We held each other when we spoke of the pain from our childhoods. We supported each other when we spent way too much money on outfits at the Cherry Creek Mall, which was too classy for a food court so we really had no business being there since we be hailing from the 19th Ward, but we wanted those pretty things and gosh darn it we deserved them!
When she left I was lost. I truly was, in every sense of the word lost. I spiraled. I made a lot of quick choices to try to fill the void. Not the void of her, but the void she helped expose. While she went back to college on the east coast, back to to dorm rooms, parties with red cups and ramen eating, I sat alone trying so hard to not need anyone, to not be weak. I wanted to live on my own, hundreds of miles from anyone who really knew me. I wanted to prove I was strong. But of course I needed people and what transpired over the next few months was me trying desperately to cling onto this persona I had worked so hard at creating. Being tough, hard, resilient. There is nothing wrong with possessing these qualities but trying to only possess these pose quite a problem to the realty of being human. As I sunk further into a shroud of darkness there were some lights always dancing around me, she being one of them. Sending me cards and mixtapes. Telling me she loved me. Telling me how beautiful she thought I was.
Almost ten years later from that she still gives me cards and mixtapes, in facet I'm listening to the latest one right now(shout out to Sarah McLachlan!) She still tells me she loves me, and that I am beautiful. For almost three years we have lived together in the cutest apartment in Astoria, NY. This morning at 7:45am she got into a black car with luggage on her way to meet a cast of people all flying to China to perform in musical for the next 3 months. When she returns in December we will not be roomies anymore. This is truly an end to an era, but not an end to our love story, for she is my sister, she truly is, in every sense of the word sister. I love her more than I could ever adequately put into words. She knows me like the wind knows the leaves it flows through, without thought, without measure, and I know her just the same.
I love you lovey.
xoxo,
Leenie/Lovey/Gilly-lover
