Wisdom

I bit my sister… When I was ten. I bit her so hard that my tooth came out, it’s hard white peaks pressing every so slightly into the skin of her arm that it actually stuck onto it for a second or two after it disconnected from inside my mouth.

She’s two years older than me, but despite her grown-up-ness, her infinite 12-year-old wisdom, her quickness in knowing what to do, always, she stood with her mouth agape for just as long as I did. I was quiet at first, shocked, then panicked and pleaded for her not to tell mom and dad. She snarled a little with the ends of her mouth, but stood still as I plucked the tooth from her arm, held it in between my fingers, and touched the empty space where it had been in my mouth just a moment before.

She asked me a question, then, in a calm voice so different from the outraged violence I expected. See, we loved watching WWE together on Fridays, and an image of Jeff Hardy body slamming someone off the top rope came to mind in what I expected from her in that moment. But instead, she asked if that was my last baby tooth. I told her yes, and for a second she looked proud, almost like a parent…

Then she ran screaming to tell on me.

Siblings are hard. And I don’t know what it’s like to have brothers--I have three sisters myself--but I assume the periods and moments of loving each other and hating each other are universal if you’re close enough in age, if you’re involved enough to care enough to hate each other every once in a while, and forgiving enough to love each other in those other minutes, days, and years.

Those transient feelings seemed to mirror the way my friends faded in and out as I graduated high school, got a job, and went to college. People I'd spent years with learning to do calculus, smoking my first cigarette, falling in love, and driving around with nowhere to go then suddenly disappeared as we, indeed, then found somewhere to go. And as I spent my first year of college in an absolute state of social paralysis, there was my sister spending Friday nights with me eating too much pizza and doing my physics homework withnWWE on in the background.

I found out that nobody likes you when you're in your twenties. You drink too much, say stupid things that you think about at night, make people mad, and disappointed, and tired. Hell, my sister did plenty of that, and I did too.

There's one time in particular, though, and I know, this will seem very obvious, but we moved in together… with our boyfriends… all in one apartment. I think we were arguing about putting the coffee grinder away, because I always left it on the counter and it got in the way. To this day, I maintain it should stay on the counter, by the way. But we got so heated that I splashed beer at her face and she smacked me, and people had to practically pull us apart, and she was sopping wet, and my cheek was red, and we looked at each other with such raw hate. For about a year we were pretty distant, especially after I moved out.

But on some Friday, I switched on WWE and couldn't help but call her up. There wasn't any anger, like if I had reached out to an old friend I'd last seen after, well, arguing about a coffee grinder and splashing beer in their face. Not an hour later we're laughing at Edge, and Ray Mysterio, and John Cena as we scarf down burgers and old fashioneds.

Back then, I couldn’t say why we fell back into our period of loving each other. Maybe our hate clocks ran out. Or the tension was gone. Or we didn’t care about the coffee grinder anymore.

Now I think about a small, oval piece of wood hanging in my mom’s kitchen with some words carved in it that I used to look at as a kid and wonder where it came from. “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I'm not religious. But seeing those words growing up and knowing them now helps me segment what I can and can't count on to get me through. I think I've always needed serenity to tackle life, and found wisdom in what is constantly there teaching me how to be.

Sisters are the constant, I think. And I don't need courage. Kind of like how you don't need courage to get through your twenties; you either do or you don't. But it helps to have someone be both proud of you and tell you that you suck at the same time.