Sisters

People used to tell me they were jealous of my relationship with my sister.  Sisters, in general, don’t get along well, especially if they’re close in age.  That wasn’t the case with Eowyn and I.  We were as close as two separate people could be.  But when our mother died, our once envied relationship perished with her.  I don’t even know who Eowyn is anymore.

As I stood outside Eowyn’s door, my hand hovering over her door knob, I debated how necessary this was.  She had promised me her old Nikon, but she had breezed out of the house without a word early that morning and I had no idea when she would come back.

I sighed and squared my shoulders.  I needed the camera for an assignment.  I wasn’t going to wait for her to pop back home whenever she deigned convenient.  The door swung open at the light twist I applied to its knob and I gawked at her room through the doorway.  Even though her room was only down the hall from mine, it was as foreign a place to me as mine would probably be to her.  As I gathered up the nerve to step inside I realized just how much could really change in a year.

The once dark blue walls were now bright yellow.  It made the room look bigger, though it was horribly cluttered.  My hands twitched at my side.  I itched to organize and clean.  Lotion and perfume bottles littered the surface of her bureau and most of them were being used as stands for her multitude of necklaces and bracelets.  A heap of rings had been tossed in a small, blue, plastic tray in the center of her dresser.

What caught my attention the most though, was her mirror.  Pictures of all shapes and sizes were stuck haphazardly in its frame.  There were black and white photo strips from the booths at the mall, pictures I’d seen on her facebook, and even professional graduation and prom photos.  Business cards, flyers from special events, and cute cards were also ripped up or folded to fit amongst the smiling faces of her friends.  It stung a little that there were no pictures of me to be found in her frame.  Upset, I moved on.

I noticed her neatly made bed, the shades she had drawn up before leaving, and how there was no dust covering her desk despite the fact that she hadn’t used her desktop computer since before our mother died.

The bookshelf was the most cluttered item in the room.  Her book collection had more than doubled since I’d last laid eyes upon it.  The shelves themselves sagged in their middles from the sheer weight of all her books.  Paper backs were randomly shoved one on top of the other in order for them to all fit.  On further inspection though, I noticed she had her books organized first by genre, then by author, and then lastly, by release date.  It was a type of organized chaos.  Her whole room was that way, really.

The only thing out of place on her book shelf was a thin black book tucked in the corner.  It almost seemed as if she were trying to hide it.  It was a scrap book, something Eowyn had probably made out of boredom.

The contents of the first page caused me to pause in my perusal.  It was us – Eowyn and I.  The entire book was dedicated to us, filled with pictures of us as newborns all the way up until the past year.  There were pictures I didn’t even know we still had.  Pictures I didn’t even know existed.  Tears I hadn’t realized I had been crying dripped onto the book.

My sister still loved me.