My Other Half

            by Maya Tippett

 

“I miss you.”    

            This was the statement that exited mouth most regularly during my junior year in high school. My older sister Sam had moved out of our home and was now living in Santa Barbara, going to a photography school. At that end of the summer, after our last family vacation together, my parents and I dropped her off in Southern California. We stayed at a hotel on the beach that had seashells glued to the outside of the walls.

            The night before we said goodbye to Sam, she stayed in my hotel room with me. We stayed up late, raiding the mini-bar of cookies and snickers bars. We took showers and wrapped the freshly cleaned hotel robes around ourselves. I watched Finding Nemo while she painted her toes pink. And she braided my hair before bed, one last time.

            We had our last family dinner that we’d be having for a long time. First my mother and then my dad gave her hugs and kisses goodbye. As I watched in the shadows for my turn, everything slowed down. I was able to ask myself, “Is this it? Is this how our childhood ends? Right here on the corner of State and Cornelia?” Time paced itself back to normal, as I inhaled her in the best “goodbye” hug I could manage. She was crying, but I was fighting desperately not to. Even though a lump rose into my throat, I kept it down. I wouldn’t let them see me cry, not even my own family. As we drove away, she got smaller and smaller until she faded away from my sight. I felt wrong sitting alone in the back of our newly rented van.

            I did my best to keep my tears at bay, but once I entered my hotel room and was more alone than I had ever been, they burst out of my tightly squeezed eyelids, as if fighting for air. They uncontrollably streamed down my face and poured off the end of my nose, forming a puddle onto the crisp hotel pillow, I felt so helplessly alone. As I lay there crying, I felt undeniably sorry for myself, which only made the tears quicken their pace. All I could think about was how much I was going to miss her. Who am I going to go to for advice on boys? She always knew what to say. Who’s going to stroke my hair until I fall asleep after I have a bad day? The room transformed from the fun vacation spot my sister and I had so lavishly indulged in the nigh before, into an unwelcoming desolate room that held all my insecurities on display. I noticed how strikingly white the room was, something that had slipped my observation earlier. The walls were white, the cupboards were white, the bed was white, the bathroom tiles were white, I felt as thought I was standing out and there was nowhere to hide, not even under the white covers.

            My biggest hear has always been vulnerability. I try never to cry in front of anyone, and in the rare occasion it does happen, I feel humiliated. Perhaps the reason crying makes me feel so uncomfortable is because I don’t cry in front of my family. I’ve always felt that among my sister, mother, and father’s problems, there simply was never enough room for my tears. I somehow slipped into the role of listener and confidant in my family and any crying or unpleasant thoughts from me were to be done on my own time. I this moment I was by myself, and yet I still felt foolishly guilty. I curled into the corner of the all-white king-sized bed and wrapped the covers around myself. I fell asleep watching a documentary on animal planet about Jane Goodall and her apes.

            My parents and I drove home the next day. I hardly spoke with them for the entire six-hour drive. My vision blurred as I stared out the speckled glass of our car. We had been on the same straight road for the past two hours. The only changes were the tracks on my CD player and the fleeting images of my childhood that danced around my head. I just listened to the music and thought about how after this instance, I would never want to hear the same songs again, in fear that they would bring me back to this unbearable feeling of emptiness.

            I remembered when Sam and I watched Peter Pan together. She always got the end of the couch that was closer to the T.V., because she’s older. We snuggled under the blankets and intertwined our feet, turning our legs into a tangled nest of limbs. We watched Tinkerbelle sprinkle the magic pixie dust onto the children as Peter Pan told them to wiggle their shoulders and just think lovely thoughts. Caught in the moment, truly believing we could fly, Sam and I would take turns jumping off the edge of the couch into the air, seeing who could “fly” for longer. All this fun ended abruptly when I jumped without warning, assuming I would fly, and landed full force on Sam. My stomach collided with her sharply bent knees and the air was forced out of my body. That day we both learned that there was no such thing as flying, and I learned what it felt like to have the wind, quite literally, knocked out of me.

            My CD player came to the end of the last track. My displaced mind drifted back to the present, leaving my memories swept away in the corner. I glanced outside the window as our car slowed down, and we drove past an accident. A car was flipped upside down and had fallen into a ditch. I saw a man, lying face down, bloody, on the side of the road. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was watching him take his last breath, or if I knew about his life shattering circumstance before his own family did. The song I was listening to quickened in pace and I fell back into my past. It was on my first birthday, when my parents were simultaneously hit by a car, flung in the air, and abandoned on the side of the road. My mother was wearing her favorite red dress, which was blood stained and torn. I was too young to remember the incident, but it’s a story I know like the back of my hand, I’ve heard it so many times. The sight of the man on the pavement brought an image of my parents lying limply on the street into my psyche. The only thing I do recall is that I knew that as long as Sam and I had each other, we’d be all right in the end.

            The line between the glass and the world beyond blurred, my vision glazed over, and my eyes fixated on the changing scenery of grass fields and small towns. “I hate you. I wish you were dead.” Her voice still sounded strong in my head, even all these years later.

            “Well, you’re fat,” was my only retort to top her piercing words, which had cut so deep. I can’t even remember why we were fighting. It was so long ago. However, her words have never left my memory.

            We grew up together. Every change we encountered, we faced together. I remember she cried the night I stopped believing in Santa Clause. I was sleeping in her room on Christmas Eve, like every year, and I told her, “Sam, there’s no such thing as Santa, is there?” She paused in her response and I saw her eyes shimmer in the darkness.

            “Of course there is. How do you think we get all those presents in the morning?” I could tell she was trying to convince me.

            “I saw them Sam. I saw mom, dad, Grandma, and Grandpa putting the presents under the tree.”

            “Come here.” I climbed into her bed and she pushed the curtain open to look out the window into the night sky. “Look,” she said. I pressed my forehead against the glass, looking for something I didn’t know what I was looking for. “There! Did you see him? It was him! It was Santa Clause in his sleigh!” Sam’s voice sounded so honest.

            “No way. Really? Did you really see him?” I went to bed that night, somehow convinced that Santa did in fact exist.

           

            I didn’t tell my parents that I had cried so much the night before; I kept it secret to myself. I later realized that that night had been a dividing line for me. Santa Barbara had split me in two. One part of me I left there, my childhood, my past person and what vision I had believed myself to be. And the other part I brought back to Berkeley. It was a part that I wasn’t aware of. I had lost my identity and was supposed to suddenly embrace this new part of that I wasn’t familiar with. I came back without my crutch, standing on my own two feet. It took me a while to differentiate between that fact that Sam wasn’t part of my identity, she was part of my life. Growing up I had always assumed that we were part of the same person and without the other we couldn’t function. The day we dropped her off I was slapped in the face with the realization that we were two different people. My brain wrapped itself around the novel proposal, but it was simply too much for my heart to understand. I didn’t just feel divided in two, I felt ripped in half.

            Being home felt strange. My home was broken to me and there was nothing I could do to fix it. Ti was as though someone in our family had died. There was always one less person at the dinner table. I missed the sound of running water from Sam washing her face when I was getting ready for bed. I missed my dad yelling at us for laughing too loud, late on school nights. I missed knowing that her head was just on the other side of the wall when we were falling asleep.

            As much as I missed the happy memories, I missed the bad ones just as much. Screaming at each other at the top of our lungs, stealing each other’s clothes, pulling hair when we were fighting, she even spit in my face once. Even if I didn’t speak with Sam for a whole day, just knowing she was there was enough for me. My mom and dad kept telling me, “She’s only a phone call away,” but a phone call felt too far.

            Silence took over our home like a dark cloud looming in the air. Our dinner conversation turned from laughing hysterically and having dramatic tales of how our day went to my parents talking business and me staring blankly at whatever vegetable was set in front of me. It just wasn’t the same without Sam. At night there was no dripping of the faucet from across the hall as I waited desperately for sleep to rap its arms around me and take me away to the city of dreams and the valley of unconsciousness.

            I started having mini panic attacks. My ribcage would feel to constricting to take in any substantial amount of air. The night became my worst enemy. I was left alone with my thought of missing Sam. The darkness would surround me and I had to succumb to the lonely night that waited.

            For the first year that Sam was gone, we talked once, maybe even twice a day on the phone. She would drive back home almost every other weekend just to see me. Now, in her second year of absence, we don’t talk as much. We call each other maybe once a week. When we do see each other we pick up right where we left off, acting as though nothing has changed, even though we both know everything has. I’ve learned that sometimes in life, you have to be alone.