Page 31 - Contrast1988Spring

~ave taken place during combat time. It was also during this
tirne that my sister shot up five inches, gained twenty pounds,
and I began to lose my physical edge, sporting as many
scratches and bruises as she did. I also began to take a deeper

~O?kat our relationship and compared it to the relationships my
nends had with their sisters. I wondered why we were
s~rangers to each other and did not share the close ties that
SIsters were supposed to share. On occasion, I would even

~ong for t~is type of bonding. But generally this feeling w?uld
ade as quickly as my sister could walk into the room weanng
my barrettes or I would be consumed with boredom and
would need a quick fighting fix.

Towards the end of high school things began to take a
turn for the better. Our days of physical brawling had long.
s.lI1ceended (I believed we had both tired of constantly looking
eke we had been attacked by cats), and our fights were purely
. erbal. Gradually these arguments became more and more
~nf~equent as we came closer to having civil discussions. I
eheve the real turning point for both of us was when I
overheard another girl giving my sister a hard time and felt ~
huge rush of protectiveness as I jumped to her defense. ThIS
surpns~d my sister as much as I had surprised myself. If was
after this particular incident that the walls between us that had
been built strong over years of taking one another for granted

and not truly knowing each other, began to crumble. I wa~
~azed to learn that she felt that same way I had about startIng
hIgh school, that she really hated being a cheeerieader but
thought her friends would hate her if she quit, that she wanted
to have a boyfriend because sometimes she was lonely, that
for all those years, she had honestly thought I had hated her.

This year, on one particularly beautiful October day, I
Watched my sister walk out onto our high school football field
as the announcer called the names of the sophomore
homecoming representatives. I had to brush away several
~ears as I realized how proud I was of her and h?w l~1UChI
espected the person she had become. The Ba~ble WIth the
black hair has been shoved into a box in the atnc, I have my
own phone to use, and I hope that maybe those years were not

Contrast Spring 1988 27

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