Ode to sisterhood

For Z

This week, a little nostalgia for life and the people you’ve known forever. I wrote this one for my sister Z but you probably have your own Z.

Remember when we planned to walk across the city, all the way from Centrepointe to Elmvale? You’d just moved to your first apartment and I missed you desperately, missed walking into your room and falling asleep on the floor while you finished cramming for a psych exam. Missed deciding to bake chocolate cake at 10 pm on random Wednesdays. Missed whispering all night, dropping suddenly into silence when Mama passed in the hallway, two light knocks on the door. Namo ba’a ya banaat.

Remember how we used to find every excuse to go out for walks that never ended, looping through the neighbourhood, crescents on crescents, roads that wound and wove like knotted noodles? Remember how we’d pull on every layer at thirty below, sweaters and coats and hats and scarves and gloves and double socks and arctic-level boots? Remember how we’d pull our hands out of our mitts when they got too cold and use our breath to blow the mitts up like hot air balloons, anything to save our frozen fingers? Remember how we’d shudder and shiver and look at each other and say are you too cold? no are you? no, one more block, one more block until fifteen blocks had passed and we couldn’t take it anymore? Remember how we’d come home and peel off our boots and socks and hop from foot to foot as our toes thawed, that burning-freezing ache as the blood flow returned?

sunset a few days ago. Felt like nostalgia

Remember how we planned and planned our every stop on that cross-town walk but never went, how the plan itself became the project, how we said we’d go after finals, after driving exams, after graduation, after I got back from visiting Aminah in Cali, after engagement planning, after pregnancy and birth, after wedding planning, after you finished packing, after you’d come back for the summer after after after after?

Remember how we eventually stopped talking about it? How we had our babies and toddlers following us like ducklings so that even a walk to the park became an undertaking? How we had to schedule around naps and school and daycare and dinner? Remember how we put our headphones in across a million timezones and took walks together, each in our own city, me bundled up the wazoo like we always had, you in your lightest cotton layers and a bottle of water to stave off heatstroke?

Remember how I came back and then you came back and then you left and then I left and then I came back and then you came back and now when we call each other we’re only twenty minutes away but actually finding the time to sit down is like solving a 3D puzzle while walking backwards on a treadmill? And so we take it when it happens, arms open wide in gratitude for the miracle of an hour with the girl who read my thoughts for the first two decades of my life, arms open in gratitude for the turning of the world, for the cycles that take us through this dunya, for still wanting each other’s company in spirit, even when we can’t have it in time.

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Who do you miss? Even if they’re still in your life?