Blue Sisters

A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend? Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. True sisterhood is not the same as friendship. You don't choose each other and there is no furtive period of getting to know each other. You are a part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.

It was easy to love someone in the beginnings and endings; it was all the time in between that was so hard.

But what they don’t know is this: As long as you are alive, it is never too late to be found.

He was the only man in the house, but he also was the house. They lived inside his moods.

I think you're the opposite of insufferable, I suffer you gladly.

Avery had previously thought love was built on large, visible gestures, but a marriage turned out to be the accrual of ordinary, almost inconsequential, acts of daily devotion—washing the mugs left in the sink before bed, taking the time to run up or downstairs to kiss each other quickly before one left the house, cutting up an extra piece of fruit to share—acts easy to miss, but if ever gone, deeply missed.

believe in nothing but a woman’s capacity to survive disappointment

Their family had always been good at hellos and goodbyes, moments ending even as they began. It was easy to love someone in the beginnings and endings; it was all the time in between that was so hard.

You are not that important.

I believe that everything happens,” she said. “Period. Or full stop, as you would say. That’s it. Things happen and we have to learn to live with them, as long as suicide is off the table, that is. If we can find meaning in them, fine, but even if we can’t, we still have to live with them. The meaning is an afterthought, an anesthesia. Happens is the only word in that statement that’s empirical. The rest is whatever helps you sleep at night.

They say you don’t know your principles until they become inconvenient to you,

It is good you have each other, the artist had said, regarding them seriously as she worked. You never have to explain yourself to sisters. It was true. Being one of four sisters always felt like being part of something magic. Once Bonnie noticed it, she saw the world was made up of fours. The seasons. The elements. The points on a compass. Four suits in a pack of cards. Four chambers of a human heart. Bonnie loved being a part of this mystical number, this perfect symmetry of two sets of two.

She'd heard once that guilt was for something you'd done- you could feel guilty for a certain behavior or action but still fundamentally know you were a good person- but shame was deeper, shame was for who you were.

Could you fall out of love with life if you were never in love with it?

I miss her and I miss her and I miss her," she began. "And I wait for the feeling to end because every other feeling has ended, no matter how intense, no matter how hard - but this won't. There's just no end to the missing. There was life before and there's life now. And I can't seem to accept it. I can't accept that I'll have to miss her forever. There will never be relief. There will never be a reunion. And I wish I had a God. I wish I believed in an afterlife or something, anything. But when I try to talk to her in my head, there's no response. I can't hear her. And I can't feel her. All I have is this missing. And part of me is glad it won't end because it's all I have to connect me to her now.

As long as you are alive, it is never too late to be found.

A lot was written about romantic love, Avery thought, about the profundity of that embrace. Bu this, too, was deserving of rapture, of song. Before she ever knew a lover's body, she knew her sisters', could see herself in their long feet and light eyes, their sleek limbs and curled ears. And, before life became big and difficult, there were moments with them when it was simply good: an early morning, still dark out, their parents asleep. Her younger sisters arriving one by one at her bedside, hair tangled, exuding their sour and sweet morning musk. She'd lifted the covers for each of them, letting them crowd into her bottom bunk, bodies pressed tight against one another, and they'd fallen asleep again like that, dropping off like puppies curled around a mother's warm belly.

I know,” said Bonnie. “I love you too. Without the too.” It was what Nicky used to say to them. No too. Just love.

The concert was three hours of heaven, all of them scream-singing the words to every song along with thousands of other girls, lifted together on a tide of riotous, unapologetic joy, the feeling that to be a girl with other girls was not some weakness, as they had been told, but a power, the best and luckiest power on earth.

like comparing a fireplace to a forest fire. One was comfort, the other carnage.

The problem with her pain was that it was invisible. Avery wished she could have given it crutches, some object that made it obvious to everyone around her, but she had learned now that most pain is private.

You never have to explain yourself to sisters.

I find what gives me pleasure and I do it until it gives me pain," she said. "Every time." Charlie looked at her with his funny half smile. "Yeah, but how else would you know when to stop?

But Chiti didn't understand what it was like to have sisters. Against their parents, against the world at large, they were fiercely allied. But among themselves, everything was a competition. There was never enough attention, never enough money, never enough love to go around. So they fought for every scrap.

That was family, she thought sadly, the root of all comfort and chaos.

Her sister curled in on herself, as though she could make herself small enough for the hurt not to find her.

Once you get to my age, you will learn that you can take a lot of wrong turns and still end up in the right place.” “I don’t

But their family wasn’t normal. Addiction whirred through all of them like electricity through a circuit.

the best way to honor her sister would be to live life the way Nicky had wanted to, wide-awake and not numbing any part of it.