The Girl I Still See as a Child

In my mind, my sister has always been small. It's as if my perception of her got stuck somewhere around middle school. I can't help it. Maybe it’s a little problematic, maybe not.

But the truth is, she’s not small at all. She’s thirty now, the same age I was when I decided to leave our parents’ home. And yet, she’s already spent four years living alone, nearly a thousand kilometers away, through the heart of a pandemic, in a city that never really felt like hers. She never truly let it absorb her, never let it shape her too much. She stayed her own person.

Loud, bright, full of laughter, with that unmistakably southern accent that turns into music when she speaks. Always cracking jokes, always laughing at herself, and pulling everyone along with her.

Sometimes I think she’s the most like my father out of anyone I know. She’s taken all those little recognizable traits of his and made them her own.

If evolution happens through both subtle and obvious changes, then someone could probably write a whole lecture about her. A journey home that feels like the closing of a chapter, the return to self. A woman who’s faced hard choices, who had the courage to start again on her own terms. With closets to refill, objects to rearrange, and a body that, maybe, had started to feel too big. A cage, even.

To “focus” in photography means to choose one thing and make everything else fall away. All else becomes background. It all comes down to that one point.

My sister is thirty. And I still struggle not to see her as a kid. It’s a strange thing our minds do, the way they hold onto images that no longer fit.

Like when you eat a Winner Taco and you’re sure it’s smaller than it used to be twenty years ago.

It’s not the ice cream that got smaller.

You just got bigger.