Summary: A character sketch of my older sister.
Rating: K (content suitable for most ages)

A Private Gallery of My Sister

By: Mercury Angel II

When someone asks me to describe my older sister, I am not able to describe her well. Why not? You might ask. Because, when you have been living with a person for seventeen years, you know so much about this person that it is impossible to describe her using just one or two sentences, not to mention that she is a very complicated and mysterious person. There is really no one who can truly understand her or knows her inside out. Not even her mother.

My sister is a skinny petite young woman. She has a sweet round face and healthy orange-ish skin, which is tanned by exposure to the sunlight. Her brownish black eyes are small, but big enough to catch everything that moves within her eyesight. She has short straight black hair down to her neck, that shows the color auburn when the sun shines on it, and has a tendency to become messy and fluffy in the morning. Her hands are one of the most slender and pretty ones I have ever seen, but they have a tendency to become sweaty, which forbids her from playing any instruments. Always speaking a low and mature voice, she sounds as if she were a thirty-year-old woman.

Unlike me, my sister conquers tests and quizzes, and gets straight A’s in honors and AP classes. She moves quickly around the room and completes things fast and efficiently. When she’s overloaded with homework, she sits at her desk for hours, never wasting any time and always finishing her work on time.

I only have a few pet peeves. One of my pet peeves is my sister’s habit of leaving a mess on her desk and in her room. Yet surprisingly, when asked to find a highlighter or a paperclip in her mess, she can always find it. Every time she leaves her room, she tells me the exact same quote over and over again.

“Don’t move the stuff on my desk. Don’t try to put everything into order. In fact, don’t touch anything until I get back.”

“Why don’t you clean your mess? You can easily lose stuff like this. I don’t want you coming to me and blame me for taking your stuff when you can’t find them in your mess,” I said to her.

“Look, it’s already organized, okay? I know where everything is,” she replied.

One day I mentioned my sister’s mess in her room in front of a teacher who taught her electronics and knew her well. The teacher just grinned and told me that although he could not imagine my sister to be messy, he believes that my sister is a highly organized person, and even a mess that she creates is somehow organized in some way.

I remember we often did not get along when we were little. My parents have an old yellow photo of our big family posing in front of a gray elephant in the zoo more than ten years ago. In the middle of the picture, my sister grabbed my face, and turned it violently to face the camera, ignoring my painful facial expression and my twisted neck. When I accused her of always being a bully back then, my sister blushed. She admitted she was often very mean to me, and explained that it was because I got more attention from my parents. However, she does not recall adding the word “stupid” before my first name whenever she called me. She does not recall that when I talked to her, she got impatient and refused any further conversation with me. When my parents were not home, she often chased me around the house with a stick in her hand, yelling, “I hate you! You’re annoying to look at!” She does not remember this either.

Yet, she remembered all the good times we had and all the moments that are meaningful and important to us. She can still picture vividly how shining the red candles burnt on the big white cake on my first birthday. She would never stop telling me how she loved to hug me wildly when I was a baby. Often, she describes to me how cute and adorable I looked when I was little. She would always say I was the cutest little girl she had ever seen. Every time she comes home from the University of Michigan, we get together and laugh about the incident that occurred on the first day I enrolled in high school—how she messed up my actual age and thought that I was still in elementary school.

Although we don’t talk a lot about the bad times we went through together, I know she did not forget during the several weeks my mom was away from home visiting our dying grandma, she took charge of my mom’s usual housework and cooked meals for me and my dad. Once, my sister came back home from Michigan to spend the holiday as usual, but this time she saw me jumping on crutches and my tangling injured leg instead. Her expression grew from shock to blank and finally to sadness. She became very quiet and pretended nothing fatal had happened to my leg. Other people might think she was cold and didn’t care about me, but I knew better. I could see she wanted to tell me something soothing or ask if my leg was causing me a lot of pain, but she knew if she raised the topic, it would only make everyone sad. So she decided not to say anything, but sat right beside me and never moved away. And when I got up to walk with crutches, she opened the doors for me. In that comfortable silence, I found peace and felt utterly content despite the sadness and pain from my injury. It was then that I finally understood that my sister shows love in a different way than most people. Her love is like the blue sky; it’s far from reach yet it’s near for comfort.

I’ve never understood my sister entirely, but I know she expresses her love differently. I don’t care how she used to treat me when we were young. We are sisters and we love each other. I don’t mind being yelled at or nagged by her. Her yelling and nagging are signs of affection. You yell at people you care about when they do something wrong; you nag at them because you love them. I will never forget the wonderful memories of my dear protective big sister and the spicy little girl that chased after me with a stick in her hand.

--End--