entering is easy. it’s the leaving that’s hard.
It was easy – simple – the way we stepped into each other’s lives: A question, an answer, and suddenly we’re living together, hundreds of miles from home. It’s always the easy choices, the ones only 18 year olds can make, that end up haunting you the most.
there’s always warning signs – red flags they call them – but it’s hard to know what to look for if they’ve never been lived before.
There was very little that was sacred between us. I knew that from the beginning. It was in the little things – in the way she spoke my name, in the casual way she shed her chaos – and in the big things – heavy breathing from her bed, two bodies squirming, shushing, failing discretion. I never asked her for sacred in us, in Sisterhood: instead she gave it, made it, offered it. And I was the fool who made sacred the profane.
It takes losing a sister to understand truly the depths of self-betrayal
She was never mine to lose. Nor was I hers. It took me a long time to see that, to know it fully in my body, to accept it as truth. Because what she said, and what she did were in conflict, always. And at the time, I never saw her fully – like the four blind mice, and the elephant, I only ever saw the parts of her.
It’s in the leaving that we hope to find ourselves again. It’s also in the leaving that we choose to leave behind a version of who we used to be.
I know now that I traded parts of myself when I left. At the time I thought it was a barter, that one day, I’d knit the parts back together, that I’d find what I’d lost in our the chaos of our Sisterhood. But there is no bartering in growth: only loss, and figuring out how to adapt, how to move forward.
Home Sweet Home 