I certainly can’t pretend that my experience here is one of particularly revelatory nature.Since I’ve arrived, I’ve mostly been following my little sister around through markets and temples, eating frequently at a chic expat-friendly vegetarian restaurant with a quaintly misspelled English name, buying funky used dresses at the one vintage clothing store that will fit my massive European frame, and getting lost, fairly regularly, as my sister tries to navigate the grid-like moat surrounding the old city.
She’s teaching English here, at the university, with her boyfriend. Like most 22-year-olds, she is just starting the process of setting up the rest of her life, and making decisions about who she wants to be and where she wants to go in her life.
She has a cluster of adult friends, some young like her, some older. And they invite her to dinner parties and for cocktails. And she rides around on the back of a motor scooter with her slight boyfriend, a sandy-blond-haired poet with a lilting, throaty voice that pleasantly winds its way into conversations like a piece of string between your fingers.
They live in this abandoned, too big, almost-mansion on a quiet little road near the university. The house is full of all sorts of remnants of the adult lives previously led here, Teak furniture that was here when they moved in, a grand wooden staircase, and a second-floor balcony, which overlooks a still fairly well-kept rose garden. And it is full of little kid things brought by the seven barely adult college graduates now inhabiting the place. There’s a hookah in the living room, a (presumably) ironic poster of an animated basketball movie from the 1990s starring Michael Jordan, plastic deck chairs and scattered, opened bottles of wine on the veranda, as well as a place in the backyard where drunken bonfires have been built – I am told.
We are six years apart, my sister and I. And I have always shared a particularly fraught sisterly relationship with her -- as I been both more motherly than my other sisters toward her, owing perhaps to the fact that we were born on almost the exact same day -- while I have also been somehow less prepared, less grown-up, and ultimately less decisive about the life I want to live than our other siblings.She resents me -- because I am older and tell her what to do when I barely know what to do with myself.
And because I make her cry, unintentionally of course, whenever I call into question her ability to handle things by herself.
And still, I think I must also be the sister she most relates to, in some ways, as we share a sort of pathological disorganization, a wandering spirit that seeks chaos over order, and the occasionally self-destructive need for independence that I am often quick to lecture her about, despite my own impulsive tendencies.
It's funny now to be here, at the intersection of several emotional crises in my own life. I have typically made a mess, or several messes, of things in my life. And instead of being the older sister with wisdom and advice for her -- I am seeking a kind of reassurance for her that I cannot give myself.
Seeing her newly in love, giddy with the prospects of setting up a house and traveling to far-off places, I am understanding for the first time the difference between 22 and 28.
I have made mistakes, but those bother me less, as I have typically learned from them, and honestly, they make better blog posts than anything I could make up.
But it’s the choices, from all the accumulated days that I have lived since I was 22 and first seeking independence, love, happiness and my dreams, that one way or another have brought me to the place that I am.
And it’s those choices that I am carrying with me here -- to a place where I thought at the very least I would clear my head and see straight away from the multiple lives I am a part of.
I’m not quite sure how that is working out so far.
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