Accumulated experience has taught me to curate my thoughts, be mindful of when and how to share them, at least with strangers. It’s unfortunate and unfair when your words are purposefully taken out of context and used against you. When I was little, though—in elementary school, say—I was never shy with anyone. Hello, you’re pretty! No, I don’t want your half-eaten donut, gross. Yes, I wanna play! Race you! Um...your hair looks weird.

“Be nice!” Mom would shush, seeing as I had just addressed her hairstylist.
“But it’s the truth!”

In a world where so much was unknown to me, how could I not be affirmative of what I did know—what was true to me? “You’re allowed little white lies,” Mom advised, “so you don’t hurt people’s feelings.” But I couldn’t make sense of that. It unnerved me to say anything that didn’t accurately reflect reality as I knew it. At all times. Especially if you asked.

My outspokenness was good for one thing, though. Unlike me, my little sister Deanna didn’t often talk. At home, sure, we gave voices to her barbies and she jabbered away at me, argued with me, but away from home she must have felt shy. She was, after all, very little. And I spoke for her.

I used to know Deanna so well I could sense what was going on inside her, when she was carsick and was about to throw up, when she awoke from a nightmare and was about to walk into my room and slip in my bed for a cuddle, when she was craving specifically fish sticks and raspberry turnovers. I could especially sense when she felt uncomfortable, at a loss for words and explanations, and needed rescuing, from kids or adults.

I’m sure how I knew came about by way of unconscious pattern recognition and the fact that, as kids, Deanna and I were each other’s sister, playmate, constant annoyance and constant companion. But I have to try really hard to not let that reasonable explanation dissipate the magic that is childhood closeness. I knew what she was thinking! The only comparison I can imagine might be when couples who have been married for the majority of their lives have come into such familiarity that they can finish each other’s sentences and convey whole conversations with a passing glance.

And just to make sure I wasn’t remembering a fantasy, I checked in with Deanna:

“Yeah, I remember that. I remember doing that with you all the time. I just remember feeling comfortable letting you talk for me when I didn’t want to talk. I trusted you to say what I was thinking. I remember a specific time when we eating dinner. I didn’t like the food and wasn’t really eating, but wanted something to drink. I was just sitting there. All I had to do was look at you. You didn’t look at my plate or my empty glass. You just said, Deanna’s thirsty. You were so authoritative about it. It was just a fact.”

Such a relationship with my sister has been the only one of its kind that I’ve ever known. And I don’t have a relationship like that with anyone at this point in my life, even with Deanna. The loneliness and individuality of adulthood, time spent apart, different relationships and different experiences have rendered us less accessible to each other, however close we may be on the spectrum of adult-sibling closeness.

But it’s good to remember.