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I have recently come to realize there are many things I failed to say, reflect upon or acknowledge this year, so I am attempting to do so, starting with this first post.
My sisters are a little less than four years younger than me. For most of my childhood, this meant that we were unfathomably distant age-wise, that they would forever be separated by an unfordable generational gap, never to be my peer or my contemporary or my equal. My kid sisters, always.
When Gloria announced her engagement to her fiance early last year, it took a long time for me to fully understand the implications of that decision. Sure, I knew the lyrics to this particular song, it’s one I’ve whistled along to not a few times now—weddings and new lives together and wearing tuxedos and family getting together and all that—but it wasn’t until the moment Aaron took the microphone at the ceremony and gave his self-composed vows that I began to realize the enormity of the situation.
It wasn’t the part where my sister was entering into a lifetime of paired commitment with a somebody who was ready to spend the rest of his days with her, no, that was easy. But that this guy, this total stranger, relatively speaking (He’d only known her for three years. Three years! How could that possibly be enough to know that she is the one?) was now the most important person in her life, and moreover, this total stranger was absolutely besotted with her. Sitting in a black tuxedo under a summer Florida sun, listening to his vows, my brain exploded. Sort of.
How could this be possible? How could anybody say these immodest, effusive words, claim this life-altering affection for anybody in my family? This is my sister, my kid sister who has giggle-fits with her twin after every meal, who’s compulsive about order and cleanliness, who hates scary movies and likes mushy vegetables, not somebody’s soulmate or reason to get up in the morning. Come on, stop it with that nonsense.
She is—we, our family, are—nothing special, just normal, average, peculiar folk, no big deal. She isn’t—none of us are, I promise—anybody’s soulmate, the answer to anybody’s prayer, the one you’ve waited for, the half you didn’t know you were missing—she’s isn’t any of that, can’t you see she’s just Gloria, just a girl, my sister, part of my family, one of us standard-issue regular normal people, nobody can possibly think those insane, crazy things about any of us, so please stop, you’re embarrassing me, and it’s becoming ridiculous, the things you’re saying.
This is the part where I ought to describe the epiphany I had, but there really wasn’t one. I went through the rest of wedding in distracted wonder, turning the words of their vows over and over again in my head. The truth of the matter is, it still amazes me that anybody can think that way about any of my family, or feel the things they feel about my siblings, or be driven to the incredible lengths they go to be with them. Such are the excesses of literary fiction, not the stuff of our normal, modest, sensible, rational lives. Intense, confident, sweeping, once-in-a-lifetime love simply does not happen to people to us—but no, that’s clearly not true on the face of it, as Gloria demonstrated.
In the months since their wedding I’ve come to better appreciate exactly how much Gloria and Aaron are in love with each other, and what the words spoken at the ceremony actually mean. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was completely wrong, or mostly so. All I need to do is survey my list of friends and smile as I think of them, unmarried and married, expecting or with children, near or far, or talk to my sisters: such love does exist, and is extremely common, in fact. It’s a wonder, yes—nevertheless it happens all the time, even to rational, sensible, average people like my siblings.
Just not to me.