The Outstanding Sisters

People don’t always know how to respond when they learn I have a sister I don’t speak to. Some rush to fix it: You should reach out. Others turn it into a moral equation: But she’s your sister. 

What I want to say is more complicated: Shared history, instead of binding, can calcify. The roles we learned as children—protector, translator, witness—can become too small, too rigid, to contain the people we grow into. Case in point: the two versions of my sister.

The first is easy to hold: she is small, quick, always half a step behind me, as if my shadow had learned to speak. We share a home, a backseat, a language made of glances. I know how to make her laugh. I know what scares her. I know the tone that will bring her running, or send her away. In this version, our lives are braided so tightly it does not occur to me that they could ever come apart.

The second is harder. She is an adult now, somewhere else, living a life that does not intersect with mine. I do not know what she eats for breakfast, or the names of her friends, or what she tells people about her childhood—whether I appear in those stories at all. In this version, we are not braided. We are parallel lines, once touching, now moving quietly away.

Estrangement is a strange kind of loss. There is no funeral, no shiva, no sanctioned moment to say: something irrevocable has happened. The loss arrives gradually. A missed call. A holiday spent in separate rooms—literal or emotional. A silence that stretches long enough to feel intentional, even if no one has said so.

What remains are memories, scenes that play in my mind.

As children, when our parents fought we retreated to my room. The door closed, or almost. I was old enough to understand, or to think I did. She was younger, still looking to me to translate the world, to make it make sense. We sat close together, waiting it out. And then we sang.

We made up a song about ourselves—The Outstanding Sisters. TOS. The name felt official, as if we could declare our bond into permanence. I don’t remember most of the words. Only one line that has stayed, bright and intact: we come here to talk and play, let’s give three cheers right away. It was simple, almost absurdly cheerful. That was the point. Our voices filled the room, pushing back against what we could not control. It was a kind of shelter. Not the kind that stops the storm, but the kind that lets you endure it.

I remember our birthday celebrations. Our birthdays are only a week apart—mine first, then hers—but we celebrated them together. One long Sunday stretching into evening. First one group of friends, then another. Our same parents, aunts and uncles, our same cousins and grandparents, staying the whole time. Two cakes, one after the other. Two sets of candles, and two sets of birthday songs in multiple languages. But a single gathering, a single feeling that this belonged to both of us. It felt as if we came as a pair. As if time itself had arranged us side by side.

Another memory, years later. I am seventeen; she is eleven. The earthquake has just passed, or maybe it is still passing—the earth not yet fully trustworthy beneath our feet. We go outside. I don’t remember who suggested it, or who brought out the ice cream. Only that we sit there together, holding something cold and sweet while the world steadies itself.

And somehow, we feel happy. Not because anything is okay. Things have fallen; things are out of place. Afterward, I will walk through the house taking pictures of what has been knocked over, documenting the small ruins. But in that moment there is a quiet relief, almost a lightness. We are together. The worst has passed. The night air holds us.

This is how we survived things. Or at least, this is how I remember it. I wonder what she remembers. Estrangement leaves you with questions that have no clear recipient. They echo because the one person who could answer is the very person you cannot ask.

For a long time, I told the story in a way that made sense to me. I knew where I stood, what had happened, and why. Over time, that certainty softened. I began to see where I might have misunderstood, or pushed too hard, or failed to listen—not enough to rewrite the story, but enough to loosen my grip on it. Not self-blame, exactly, but a recognition: every relationship holds at least two truths, and sometimes they cannot be reconciled.

Still, I return to those scenes. To my childhood room, where we made something unbreakable, if only for the length of a song. To our voices, bright and defiant: let’s give three cheers right away. To those long Sundays of candles and cake, friends and family who stayed. To the night outside, when the ground shook and we did not.

I don’t know if we will find our way back to each other. I don’t know if “back” is even the right word. But I carry her with me. Not as she is now—I do not know her now. And not only as she was—memory is not fixed. I carry her with me the way we carry what we cannot resolve. 

I carry her as that song, still echoing. As that long Sunday, unbroken. As that night, when the ground shook and we held steady. As proof that once, we knew how to make a shelter out of nothing but our voices—and each other.

This essay comes a few days before her birthday. I don’t know if she will read it. I don’t know what she would recognize, or what she would refuse. I don’t know what it would mean to her to be remembered this way.

But still— happy birthday, tavalodet mobarak, and yom huledet sameach.