Notes for a 35 year old sister

A piece I wrote for my Sister on her birthday. A little self reflection and definitely an admission that she had been right all along.

Notes for a 35 year old sister

I remember being 14 years old and snidely asking my then 25 year old sister how it felt to be old? I’m not sure, I ever fully believed my statement, nor cared for its provocative inference, but then it didn’t matter because I somehow had stumbled upon what I thought was her achilles heal. She absolutely despised and continues to despise the notion of “growing up” and not so much the ‘aging’ as the suggestion that one must give up the things they love simply because they’re “too old for it”. I thought I was so clever, so smug, arrogantly mouthing off as if somehow excluded from the aging process; see at this age I felt invincible, eternally youthful, 10 years her junior and loving it, “I’m not old!” she said defiantly and quite frankly, rightly, “you just wait until your my age, then we’ll talk” she said, “yeah, yeah oldie” I replied. Now I find myself 10 years older and in that very position she had spoken of, now a decade ago; one thing, if anything was certainly clear... I was definitely not excluded from the aging process. I looked at myself in the mirror this morning and realized for one of the first times in my life, I was indeed getting older and though my seemingly pre pubescent chin yielded no more than a few single hairs, it occurred to me there and then what she had been talking about all those years ago, why she so adamantly contested my ageist insults. She was I realized, neither old, nor young, but simply the same sister I knew, loved and crucially ‘teased’ all those years ago. Her face, like mine, perhaps proof of our mortality, but her mind, her spirit, still as young and reckless as it ever was, “damn it Sharon” I felt myself saying, “you might have been right, I don’t feel old.. I just feel the same”.