My little sister is seventeen today! As both an ABBA fan and a dancer, this is a very exciting age for her. While sixteen is dubbed the sweetest, I think it’s seventeen that is the sweetest, girliest, most exciting age. Girls in songs are always seventeen and there is a reason for that. Not yet an adult, not really a child, on the brink of huge life changes but finally growing into the girl you’ve always been becoming. “Dancing Queen” will never hit as hard as it will this year.
It feels strange to celebrate my sister’s seventeenth with her when it feels like I’m still a seventeen-year-old myself. It’s strange to look at her and see simultaneously the cheeky, chubby-cheeked toddler with a bob and a Snow White dress, and the most beautiful young girl in the whole world.
Since today is Alicia day, I was inspired to share my writing about her and about sisters. I always find that writing about the things I really love comes naturally to me. Writing about my sister is like breathing.
We look quite similar; many people mistake us for twins. We don’t think we look that alike. We think we are far more alike on the inside. We are the same by nature and nurture: the same pool of inherited traits, and the same experiences and environments that have shaped us. Over our seventeen years together, we have developed this very specific and completely inscrutable sense of humour consisting of little sounds and random words that make no sense to anyone else, but that tickle us greatly. We are amazing as a team for Pictionary and charades because Liss just gets it. It is like the very landscape of our minds are shared - the same lines and shapes and colours and words.
A sister is something that you have, and something that you are. It is a privilege. It is etched into every aspect of my development and it pulses with evergreen prevalence within every part of my personality. I forget that so many people do not have this immense and organic tie to another individual. Some people have to exist in this world without a soulmate prescribed to them in childhood.
I recently read Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors. I much preferred it to Cleopatra and Frankenstein and would recommend it to anyone with sisters.
“A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. True sisterhood is not the same as friendship. You don't choose each other and there is no furtive period of getting to know each other. You are a part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.”
Liss and I have never really called each other best friends - we both have lovely best friends of our own - but I think it’s because we’ve always known what Mellors has so perfectly articulated. Being sisters is the strongest bond we could possibly share. Knowing that I’m Alicia’s sister feels like I get to stand on a podium and flaunt the accolade of sister like a trophy. Something I’m so proud of and want everyone to know. She is the coolest girl in the world and that is just a fact.
I’m so excited to be nineteen and seventeen together (very Olivia Rodrigo of us) and I hope you have the best birthday party and the best year. Happy Birthday Keg! <3
Thanks for reading! Some parts of this are extracts from a longer piece that I wrote for a creative writing submission, so are a little more poetic than what I usually share on here!
My usual posting schedule seems to have gone out the window this month, but expect lots more posts this summer ♡
crying this is so cute