Big Sister

Having a big sister is like having someone carve a path out in front of you, hacking back the brambles and flattening the nettles - taking the brunt of life so you don't have to. When we were young, she used to turn the light off, put a scarf over her head, talk in a high pitched voice and tell me she was a little alien waiting for her dad's spaceship to pick her up and take her back to space. I believed her with all my heart. Every time. Once, she climbed into the wardrobe and told me to keep my eyes closed for 60 seconds. When I opened them, she was downstairs in the dining room. For a long time I believed she could teleport.

I believed everything my sister told me. I adored her. Even when she pushed me into the scary study in our grandparent's big old house, turned off the light and locked me in. Even when she stabbed me in the hand with a pencil, leaving me with a piece of graphite permanently embedded in my palm. Even when she passed off a box of broken things she didn't want any more as a 'present', I still took it excitedly, honoured that I was allowed to have her stuff. 

Her stuff always seemed better than my stuff. Even when it was broken.

She had a knack of making things look nice. Her bedroom was always immaculate, with all her little bottles of make up and creams lined up neatly on her dressing table, and all her books in order. Over the years, she learnt the exact position of everything in her room so if I so much as breathed on her Shaggy CD, she'd know about it. 

When I went to my first disco, she did my hair and make up so I felt grown up and glamorous. When my guinea pig Smarty died, she wrote me a poem about her flying up to guinea pig heaven and meeting a boy guinea pig called Marty. When I worried about not being pretty enough, she told me that when I was older, I would appreciate what I had. When I struggled with GCSE revision, she made up a song on her guitar about the water cycle so I would remember it. She's the only one who knows the sea monkey dance. 

She knows words like metatarsophalangeal and multifidus, she taught herself the guitar, she ran a half marathon in 2 hours 9 minutes and then came back to cycle next to me. She bought her own house and made a life for herself in a town far away, she climbs, she sings, she writes stories and she wraps presents really, really well.

So this is a homage to my beautiful big sister Emma. Even though we're proper grown ups now and we don't see each other much, I still look up to you (even though you're a lot shorter than me now).

Whatever happened to that little alien, anyway?