I sat on my knees, leaning over my old kitchen table, glue stick in hand, collage paper and magazines sprawled out on the table before me. My mom sat to my right with her carefully cut shapes and perfectly non-sticky hands, creating art that struck inspiration into my seven-year-old mind. My sister sat to my left, indulging in her creative thoughts and humming a song that was incomprehensible. I perched on my chair with sticky hands and messy shapes, unable to pick an idea from my racing head. Sunlight shone through our sliding glass doors, and the wind blew through an open window, capturing my childhood in a moment.
When we were young, my sister Eva and I would spend hours in our room sprawled out on the carpet, coloring elaborate designs in our coloring books, drawing pictures of our dolls and designing new outfits for them. Hours of our lives would pass next to each other, entangled in ideas, with each line of pencil tying us closer and closer together.
When our knees would ache and our eyes would blur around the edges, we would climb down the stairs and run into the yard, bare feet in the warm summer grass. We would pick up our family iPad and pretend to be princesses. We would tie scarves in our hair to play Rapunzel and drape fabric across our arms to be fairies. We would create films worthy of Oscars in our eyes. Nothing was impossible. Life is simple when you’re seven.
“We should paint together,” my sister said during her senior year of high school.
Through the chaos of academic pressure, college applications and sports, our lives became too busy for quiet time with each other. I no longer sat with her in her room with a sketchbook or canvas, and the only time I saw her was on our journeys to the bathroom before school or through the halls of CHS. But then Eva asked me to paint with her. I hadn’t heard those words in years and they struck arteries in my soul. So we painted. The activity that once took up every ounce of my being filled a hollow space inside of me. The final moments of my childhood displayed themselves weeks before my life would change forever. Eva moved out in August.
When I feel far from my sister, when our lives move their separate ways and our phone calls become sparse and scattered, I find myself searching through old sketch pads, reading old books and watching grainy movie trailers we once made, grasping for strings of what once was, for scents and feelings of her. With every page of her waterlogged books, every stroke of her faded marker drawings, I feel a place in my heart growing with the colors and patterns of Eva. It brings back the memories of sitting on the floor next to her, hunched over our array of markers and crayons, and I find myself wishing I was seven again.
