Angel and The Devil

I remember being so upset that I impulsively ripped the metal post from my sister’s day bed and chucked it across the room directly at her head because she wouldn’t let me play with her and her friend. My mother sent me to her room because she “couldn’t even look at me,” while she patched up my sister’s bleeding scalp. I was threatened with a grounding for life, and that I had it coming, and that my mother would deal with me later. I was hyperventilating and crying on the floor of my parents’ bedroom because I could not believe what I had done. I acted out of pure fury deriving from neglect and loneliness. I was devastated by the monster who took over my conscious and hurt my older sister, but I also felt like she deserved it. I was only eight years old, after all.

I sobbed and gushed into the plush carpet in my parent’s room, cold next to their patio door, awaiting my impending doom, and who was there to comfort me? My sister! My angelic, sweet, compassionate, motherly older sister, whom I just gashed in the head with a metal pole, was sitting next to me as I wailed on the floor. She was rubbing my back and telling me that everything was going to be okay. She said she had forgiven me. I didn’t even say I’m sorry, but there she was forgiving me.

That is the kind of person my sister is and always has been. She is pure; a spec of light amongst the rest of us seem-so demons. My brothers and I tortured her; we teased her for being overweight, we mocked her lack of athletic ability, and thought her passion for theatre and forensic speech was a joke. We poked at her differences until they oozed with misery.

My father used to catch me red handed, doing something I shouldn't be doing, and the first words out of my mouth would be “Issa did it!” Shifting the blame to my sister, who was not even in the same room as me, and hoping I would get away with it. My mother used to say, “Alyssa is such an Angel! Deanna is my little Devil.”

I chalk up many traits that my siblings have to the birth order theory, my sister fitting the mold of the typical hyper-organized first-born daughter. After my parents’ divorce, she took over the role as pseudo-mother when we spent weekends at Dad’s house. My sister matured fast and enacted diplomatic, adult-like behavior when she was merely twelve-years-old. It separated us further and further because I wanted Dad’s house to be a free-for-all, paradise-vacation, rule-free, explore-every-uncensored-channel-on-television zone; whereas my sister would maintain structure, stability, and had the nerve to discipline me. Years later I realized that she was doing it all to help my newly single and seemingly clueless father. Her childhood ended with my parents’ divorce.

Despite how little my sister and I got along, we were still best friends. She knew everything about me because she listened and I knew everything about her because I read her diary. We were the classic tape-down-the-middle-of-the-bedroom kind of sisters. We fought hard but we loved harder. In high school, my sister ended a friendship with one of her closest friends because her friend had called me a bitch for not dancing with her younger brother at the homecoming dance. My sister said, “No one calls my sister a bitch… except for me.” I smiled because amongst all the tender moments we shared growing up, this was by far the sweetest. I smiled because deep down the love my sister and I shared was insurmountable; with her, I was always protected, loved, and looked out for, despite my resistance.

My sister gave me the first choice on all our shared gifts, she listened intently to all my wild theories, and she kept all of my secrets. She took the blame for the missing Christmas charcuterie board, when the night before she had walked into the kitchen to me, stoned, having a feast for one. That very night where, had I not already been so susceptible to laughter, she made me laugh harder than ever before. She kept me company, even when I was being bad or doing something wrong, she was by my side making it all seem okay.

When my sister was entering her senior year at Indiana University, I was heading the opposite direction from Chicago to attend the University of Iowa. As one would predict, the distance brought us closer. During holiday breaks, all we wanted to do was spend time together. I remember one night, after we fought for hours about how she had to gift me her favorite sweatshirt for no reason other than because I wanted it, we laid on the floor of our childhood bedroom gabbing and giggling like little girls during a slumber party. Of course, I was wearing her sweatshirt. Our conversation shifted from funny college stories to my sister in tears, fearing her future. She was confused on what she wanted to do post-graduation, a feeling I could not yet relate to, but she was leaning on me for support.

Suddenly, she started apologizing for not understanding me when we were younger, for neglecting me, for only seeing me after I would wreak some sort of havoc to get her attention. She confessed that throughout our youth, she looked at me as an extension of her, instead of being my own person. You see, my sister wanted me to follow in her path, but I was so different and incredibly defiant to be her “shadow” and for that she resented me. She resented me for being cruel to her, for always siding with my brothers and for digging into her insecurities. But she also said it made her stronger; it made her independent and unbreakable.

She told me that throughout our adolescence, she admired me for being fearless; for following any dream I had wholeheartedly and not caring what others thought. In that moment, lying on the floor, it was as if a dark veil was lifted and we saw each other for the individual, headstrong women that we are. All our differences and similarities became distant and mute, like a white bird in a blizzard. We hugged, and we cried, and we fell silent in each other’s embrace.

The year after my sister graduated college, she moved to Spain for several years and I hardly saw her. She taught English in a small town, she traveled, she embodied the free-spirited, culture queen that lit everything around her on fire. When we reunited, she had lost a considerable amount of weight, was fluent in a new language, and had a glow radiating from her persona. I was enamored, and suddenly all I wanted to be was my sister’s shadow.

During the short Christmas break of my junior year at Iowa, and in between my sister’s move from Madrid, Spain to Santiago, Chile, we were inseparable. We went for long walks around our neighborhood, we sang and danced to our favorite tunes, we casually dated two best friends so we could go on double dates together. We even slept in the same bed. A few weeks after my spring semester started, my sister rallied up our family to head to Iowa City and celebrate my 21st birthday. She prepared everything to make my birthday the most memorable: baked cupcakes to feed my billion friends, cleaned my apartment while I lounged, and kept me hydrated throughout the night, despite me eventually spitting water back into her face out of my typical defiance.

The next morning we hugged goodbye unsure when we would see each other next as she was moving to South America a few days later. I started to shake and cry, weak at the knees I laid down on the carpet of my college bedroom and wailed. My sister was there, rubbing my back and telling me everything was going to be okay. It brought me back to our childhood; I felt safe and protected.

Fast-forward a year and a half later, I sat with the 2014 graduating class of the college of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Carver Hawkeye Arena with a magnitude of emotions flooding my mind; nervous to graduate and confused on what I wanted to do post-graduation. I missed my sister more than ever. I scanned around the thick crowd until I noticed my mother’s “mom wave,” my brothers talking amongst themselves, and then a bright smile; my sister had flown home early to surprise me. Elated and baffled, I teared up, wanting so badly to disrupt the commencement speech and run up into the bleachers to embrace my best friend.

In the past four years, it is no surprise that I had the gumption to travel, to live abroad, to revel in my unique personality, or to simply be a reliable shoulder for my friends and family to lean on. I was guided by an angel.

(I do have to note: after Alyssa read this story I asked her what she thought, preparing to wrap her in my arms and hug/cry, and she replied, “You took a lot of liberties.”)