The Things I Carry: As A Sister [([Old Post, from ''The Things I Carry'' Replication])]

The things I carry as a Sister are heavy (mostly), but not tangible (mostly). They are not noticeable unless one was to witness us sisters in action, together. Our connection.

The things even an outsider can hold, that are between us, show vague insight into our relationship. Some things that I carry with my built-in best-friend are:
All the clothes we swap, but sometimes permanently trade due to her self-proclaimed bubble-butt, or even the ones we are territorial about. They weigh at least 311 pounds altogether. Maybe more. Definitely more. Then if you add the 40 pounds of shoes (some of which were once altered by her duck feet), I'm not sure if our backhoe could even effectively carry the squirming load.
The many bracelets we made for and with each other over the years. Each of these stir a distant moment in time that feels so close to yesterday.
Then there are our exchanged gifts. The guitar pick earrings. The Hello Kitty necklace. The cowboy-esque belt. The love notes. The identical ear piercings.

I also carry things that I share figuratively between my sister and me. These things are more specifically our likes and dislikes. We share so many things in common, and always have. My sister and I carry a very intriguing blend of interests, and often joke that if we were to be combined - we would be one unstoppably amazing girl. She loves math and science. I love language and art. An example of our alike differences? Both of us enjoy music, but she likes Soft Rock (Delilah sap) and I like Classic Rock. These combined weigh tra-billions of sound waves. That's more than four for sure.

The deepest things I carry as a Sister relate to my portion of our balance. Our personalities compliment each other completely. Hers is subtle, soft, smart, selectively open and collectively cautious. Mine is spontaneously expressive and loud and must weigh at least 60 tons of pressure just on its own. She teaches me to be practical and rational while I help her care less about the criticizing public-eye. I am the back and she is the bone. With these roles we carry the responsibility of stabilizing each other and growing, protecting, supporting. I look up to her so much, but as an individual I have to also remember to look level at times. I have to remember that I am my own person and I have to try to be realistic about life and how uncertain it is and how nothing can really last forever. This weighs on my mind occasionally, only 1.05milograms of space max, but carrying my own weight (that which seems to have been affected by the dreaded Freshman 15) without anything else is 118 pounds; although some sluggish mornings it feels like infinitely more. As a Sister, I double as inanimate objects. I am a chair (5.5 pounds), a tissue (1 gram), a pillow (4 ounces), a rock (7 pounds). I am a personal advisor and councilor, as well as a patient myself. She is my favorite sister, but not purely by default.

As sisters, our memories cannot be priced. They cannot be weighed either. Never. The vivid splotches of recollection: random teal diner benches and plum tiles; the night we sorted fan mail, more commonly known as college mail, in the kitchen; the crisp days we picked blackberries to make ice cream with; shooting our be-be gun at cds and pinging tin cans; making bird houses; painting wooden reindeer statues – completed with a touch of nail polish for a nose; playing ‘Spaceship’ or ‘Rent’ or hiding in the cabinet in our room with beanie babies; going under the table-saw on top of the sheetrock to draw ‘Clean Me’ in the dust; playing on the rope-swing a few days before Easter, my nails each a different vibrant color; going to see the two twin quads that were freshly painted blue and silver to hide damage; climbing Buster’s Tree with unattainable aspirations of reaching the quivering, tipping top; going to the dump in the old band van to get rid of our old pink dresser; dancing in the rain and finding refuge under the table with the built-in umbrella; making a snow tunnel and finding that our cat also enjoyed it; making forts out of chairs, bed sheets, and hair clips in the middle of the room, taking up the entire room; camping the day before one of our Freshman years of high school; breaking icicles off of the ledge of the Shop with snowballs; the list is seventeen years long. The lengthy memories: our latest cruise, our first concert, our days spent at the shore just this summer. The mere thoughts we both had and knew the other had: our car-ride there, at diner that night, in her room when that happened. Even silences scream these ideas- her eyes inform me of exactly what she needs to tell me: scolding "Not now Rachel!", praising and proud, asking "What is going on?", pleading with worried slate-colored glass shifting the question "Can we leave?". I also tend to accumulate jokes with her. There are googolplexes upon googolplexes and cumulatively these jokes weigh only 3 ounces. Not all are light, some helped us trudge through some dense times, but all are incomparably valuable. I have learned to be a comedian, as well as many other things, thanks to and with my sister.

The things I carry as a Sister are outwardly useless to the eyes of others. The ones who don't understand our constant reference to each other as 'Poopy' or the way I embarrass her at the mall by holding her hand or butt-tapping her to confuse strangers, but mostly, to make her turn purple. However, to me, these things we carry between us and because of one another are the most important pieces of my life. We hold one each other's secrets close and we hold each other's heart closer. As a sister, I carry her and she carries me, taking turns, because life is so much better on two-player mode.