Today I wanted to try something different. I’ll be reading two essays in today’s episode. One is The Ache, a Substack I wrote a year ago, and the other is Three Sisters, which you can also read below.
Three Sisters
July 24
It’s my little sister’s birthday.
My little sister who loves frogs, who called herself Ribbit as she smeared chocolate across her face and hopped around in our inflatable bounce house, the bounce house infested with mold because we turned on a hose inside of it, that melted and warped into a twisted deflated pancake during the fire.
My little sister who has golden hair and rosy cheeks and an unvanquishable smile, who giggles with me at the facial expressions of turtles on posters for indie Colorado-based alt-rock bands and wears pink dresses with me and is my everything. She wants to travel the world after she graduates college, she wants to see Australia and Hawaii and all the other important places for young women to see (she’s already been to the Rainforest Cafe).
Growing up she would waddle through the room like a little crab, pinching her fingers and mewling the word “crabs” over and over again. We would watch knockoff versions of classic movies that my dad burned from CDs at the library — I don’t know why he couldn’t just burn the regular movies — I forget exactly what they were called, but there was, like, a B-version Aladdin, where the Genie was just a purple businessman, the movie might have been called Alan. There was a freaky little show called Miss Spider’s Sunny Patch with a disturbed middle-aged spider that vaguely seemed like a sex offender. He made faces like this:
Side note: it has since come to my attention that the one and only Kristin Davis, better known by her stage name as Charlotte York, voices the eponymous Madame Spider.
We watched this movie called Pete’s a Pizza where this naked little boy was baked alive inside pizza dough. Lexi watched all of these strange programs with delight, the same way she approaches all new concepts in her life: with enthusiasm, with courage, with beauty and levity and joy. I’m nine years older than her. For a long time I was a teenager and she a toddler. And now, it feels as if we’re the same age, perhaps because I’m stunted, perhaps because she’s wise beyond the dazzling solar glow of her beautiful youth. She’s my best friend and I love her so, so much. She’s grown into such an unstoppable, brilliant young woman who can do anything she wants to. Happy birthday Lex.
It’s the anniversary of my Dad’s death.
He took his life one year ago, on her birthday. Have things changed since then? To think of it — completely. I’ve traveled, seen the entirety of the world outside of Brooklyn (Berlin and Los Angeles). I’ve spent hours on the phone with airline customer service, I’ve ridden motorcycles (electric scooters) with my arms wrapped around a man’s waist in Rome, I’ve worn lace doilies as neckerchiefs in Venice, I’ve stormed out of moving Ubers when called out on my bullshit, I’ve vomited green between my legs while still seated on a toilet in Mexico, shitting; I’ve been kicked out of an Indian restaurant in London, I’ve been warmly invited into a gang bang in London immediately following said restaurant eviction (I’ve politely declined, instead choosing the path of reading No Country For Old Men (read: checking Sniffies for better options)); I’ve written multiple drafts of a screenplay, begun a book, moved into a new home, hung drawings on my walls, had a threesome where one of the guys had braces… I’ve been fired, hired, lonely, surrounded by love.
I’ve isolated, become so self-absorbed I’ve neglected the world around me. How interesting to realize only three years into a personal blog that one is thinking of one’s own insular problems far too often. I’ve watched all of my friends as if through the concave glass of a snow globe, partying and dancing on the other side, a viscous liquid enveloping them in raves, my tantrums the method to shake it all up, to watch little white confettis settle down around their painted figurines. Or perhaps it was I inside the snowglobe, staring out, my hands pressed against the curve of my cage, screaming yet making no noise beyond my Hallmark orb. A snowglobe in summer. How neat. I’d leaned on my dad’s death as a get-out-of-jail free card, I’d let such a traumatic event excuse myself from checking in on anyone else, instead choosing to bask in the miserable fetid water inside the inflatable Shrek 2-themed kiddie pool of my mind.
There’s a life out there waiting for me to embrace it back. There are people who care about me who are waiting for me to break the glass of the snow globe and get free, to spin out with the gushing liquid and the little confettis and stand up, dry off, mind the shattered glass, and be part of things again.
I learned that, I felt that, I saw that on a beautiful night in August.
August 3
It’s my little sister’s wedding day.
Not the same sister who turned 21. The one whose name is shared with the coldest season, the one who I grew up beside, just a year above her in school, the one who grinned out at the masses with me as we dazzled the hallways of Milwaukee Montessori School. The one who bit me on the back when I stole her phone charger. The sister who feels like a big sister, in many ways, the one with the husband now, and the house and the dog and the Denver stickers on her water bottle.
She’s the sister who I used to shuttle back and forth between my Mom’s and Dad’s with, the only one who shares those memories, of the boat on the lake in the tornado, of the enormous rager Dad threw for Lexi when she turned two, when the cops came and the beer kegs were so ubiquitous and the cigar smoke so pungent and the bikini contest so flamboyant that we hid away in the overheated leather seats of some unlocked car down the road, waiting for the pandemonium to pass.
She’s the sister who I wrote A Violent Romance with — that’s the play we created that was composed of a series of vignettes, where in each scene we played a new husband and wife, and in each scene one murdered the other in ways most gruesome; a stiletto heel employed as a stabbing mechanism remains the fondest method in my heart. She’s the sister who I visited in Copenhagen, who took the mysterious edibles under the moonlight of Tivoli theme park with me, the sister I shivered in silence beside in a pizza restaurant as the THC coursed through our systems, the sister I turned to and wondered in amazement how lucky I was to be sisters with someone so cool and kind and warm and smart and curious and adventurous.
Winnie’s the sister I pranced around with in wedding dresses our mom sewed for us as little kids. She’s the sister I drove through Zion National Park with, where the car ran on fumes and I screamed that we were going to die and she was right to assure me we would make it to the next gas station just fine. She’s the one who broke up with her boyfriend while he was with us on a family trip to Arizona, the boyfriend who proceeded to stay in our AirBnB for another three days post-breakup. She’s the sister who helped me dress up our little siblings to do photoshoots on our Dad’s roof in Jersey City, she’s the one who brought us all together in Colorado, the one who got married this past weekend, the one who found true love and is so cute with her husband, Jeff. She’s one of three points in the triangle that make up that original trio: my mom and her and I. My mom — the most resilient, beautiful, welcoming, non-judgemental, incredible woman in the world.
My sister’s wedding was a dream come true. I wore a pink dress and took photos with her and her bridesmaids. We threw our bouquets in the air while Winnie bobbed up and down in a chair held above the dance floor, reaching for Jeff, smiling at the fun of it all but failing to conceal the fear in her eyes that the chair might be dropped to the floor. Lexi and I giggled at everyone and everything. I sat in my mom’s lap after almost sitting down in Winnie’s brunette friend’s lap who wore a similar floor-length pink gown (my Mom’s was better).
I love my Mom so much. I love my brothers so much. I love myself, and my friends, and turning points and second and third chances and redemption and forgiveness and dancing to Kesha and “We Found Love” and spilling red wine on my nice film camera and taking off the pretty pointed-toe shoes that burnt my toes in exchange for fugly sandals, I love being told I should have painted my toenails, I love the Colorado sky at night and the smell of the road after a Buena Vista thunderstorm and I love the river we plunged into and the subsequent post-plunge clogging of my ear, I love writing and I love not writing and I love sharing too many private details and I love regretting that decision and I love each day and I love cliché. I love the way the sunlight dappled through the trees with eyeballs on their trunks in the courtyard of my sister’s wedding ceremony. I love the white bow on the back of her dress. I love the family I have. I love my sisters.
Three Sisters x The Ache