Sisterhood.

I've always dreamed of being a sister, an older one, who would boundlessly provide care, fun and allowances and be that kind of jewelled friend that no other friendship can surpass its depth. Although my status of being a sister had been cruelly interrupted and scathed by others mistakes and choices, I must clearly state that I am blessed with a beautiful, smart, soulful sister. She is still 7 years old, but she had already imprinted a beautiful flowery road within my heart that speaks of affection and love.

The secret garden

So I spend my summers with her, in the deep green fields, spending rainy days painting, playing puzzles and chess, learning new words and watching movies. Needless to say, I even play Barbies with her and it kind of surprises me to feel bored playing with those dolls when they used to pretty much amount to my whole life back when I was young. I cannot deny that playing Barbies had significantly widened my imagination for there were always stories to make, names to name and such dramatic incidents to conjure up. I think I've experienced inspiration at such a young age, when I used to watch movies and hastily bring my dolls and play accordingly to the movie I just watched. And I would just play on and on and on till night fall. But now, as an eighteen year old, it's different. I'm not into those simple triumphant gallants taking over the world by kindness anymore although I do believe in it. But reality is so much more sophisticated, isn't it?

Well, I focus with my sister on instilling environmentally-friendly values. We go to the park, make friends with trees, catch butterflies and release them, eat fruits and get diarrhoea afterwards, and dance in our secret garden. And yes, we did actually accidentally go through a place completely surrounded by alder and plum trees, when we went through the branches, we found an enchanted garden, with wooden logs to sit on, branches for wands and endless fruit trees to brunch on. We pretended that once we entered this garden, we would be turned into magical beings, my sister became a Pegasus called Luna-

-(sometimes Majesty, depending on her mood), and I'd be a fairy called Claire. Luna/Majesty possessed the magic of the rainbows, while I had the magic of love. We also imagined my beautiful soulmate was there and we named her Nori, and she was a maroon mermaid who dwelled in the brook near the entrance of the park. We made friends with the air, it sparkled from the vivid concentrations of spells. We gathered raspberries, cherries, plums, pears and apples and sat down on the logs rubbing them on our clothes for hygiene and munching on them in magical dignity. We used to have some picnics, stroking the grass and telling the other kids who tore it while laying down in the shade that how would it feel to actually pull your hair? They stopped in alarm and got the point anyway. We described how beautiful the sky was, and made shapes of clouds, made pictures of sunsets, spent the evenings looking through telescopes to watch the stars, we also dedicated some late nights watching shooting stars and satellites just to recognise the beauty in the world. Until she actually believed that it is truly magical.

We also did homework, but nice homework. I mean, I don't know if it was effective but she eventually started to use difficult descriptive words towards the end of the summers. We spent times after breakfast learning new vocabulary alphabetically, choosing exciting beautiful words from A-Z. So we covered stuff like gigantic, starlight, amazing, fantastic, wonderful... etc. I used to teach her
how to spell the words and then make sentences of her own using them. We got along pretty fine although my sister takes fits for perfectionism. She just cannot tolerate making mistakes to the extent that I had to draw her happy faces as posters with a caption set as SMILE. And when she smiled, everything was alright.

We used to sleep together, and she'd talk endlessly, but then I'd make her sleep by singing some lullabies, to songs like Never Grow Up, Ronan, Safe and Sound by Taylor Swift and some fairytale songs, too. She'd cry sometimes because those songs are just dramatically representable of our distance, I'd whisper in her ear and sing to her with my creepy voice but she wouldn't mind. She loved them. And she always hugged me so tightly and held my hand securely, and she'd close my eyes and shift into dreamland.

Summers like those are fleeting, but when I come back, they leave a deep, heavy impact on who I am. I become different. I learn to be more patient, more loving and more accepting. I try to put myself in other people's places and feel for them, and carve my words and decisions accordingly. Of course there have been times when my sister would just storm at me, be naughtily insolent but I learned to embrace those times, talk them over and make both of us learn. I do learn not to be aggressive and not to channel my emotions wrongly whilst she learns to understand her feelings and show them in righteous ways which do not include shouting or being moody. It's a long process that I do not share it wholly, but I'm glad I get to share at least a bit of it, a bit of it that transcends me into more beautifying phases of life, that allow me to grow up gracefully. I miss her terribly, but I believe in fate and that everything that happens, happens for a reason, and that reason makes me love life, makes me more inspired, more willing to breathe.

Soraya.