The Director
by Maia Livengood

If you pop in an old VHS home movie, you can see that even early in our relationship Avery had a hold on me. It may be Avery, age seven, producing our first neighborhood play, aggressively whispering directions to the three year old flower dancing stage (the basement) right. If you were an omnipresent being you'd have seen it on our first night away from home together, when she instructed me on what to eat and when to brush my teeth. The hold is still there in high school, as she chastises my indifferent self for the lack of depth of my political knowledge.

I've always been intimidated by Avery. She was the first, she was always the best, and she never showed the slightest sign of struggle. I theorize to this day that the reason our parents gave us so much autonomy from a very early age was because of her will for independence. Perhaps I have second-sibling syndrome, but most of my competitiveness comes from trying to keep up with her (God knows surpassing perfection is impossible). That's just what she was to me: perfection.

The day came. Bye bye Davis, hello Berkeley. She didn't want to go to UC Berkeley; she wanted to go to Cornell. But with her grades, a public school tuition was near enough free. She never once complained.

To be honest, I didn't miss her much. I occasionally took the train to visit for the weekend, but I was mostly concerned with getting that great weekend story to inspire awe in the circles of overly-sheltered nerds. A knitting club hit for my knowledge on bongs and blowjobs, I had little time to think about a sister in the midst of stardom. I wish. The real reason behind me not missing her was that I no longer lived with a constant reminder about all the potential I wasn't fulfilling. Granted, I still heard about her making the dean's list, finishing an optional thesis, working two jobs and volunteering with a community gardens group. But hearing about greatness and living in its shadow on a daily basis are very different things.

It was towards the end of high school though, that I began to question how happy my sister was, rather than how successful. I'd met numerous friends of hers over the years, but she always had very different friendships than I did. While I built friendships with those who I felt comfortable disclosing intimate information, hers seemed, even from the surface, distant. I knew we had never been the type of sisters who shared secrets about the boys we liked and the girls we hated, but I always assumed she shared those things with her friends as I did with mine. She didn't.

The big double-graduation approached. 2007 meant my high school graduation and her college graduation. I already had plans to live in the Netherlands for the next academic year, and she intended to use her last summer of freedom to do a bit of traveling as well. It only seemed logical that after all these years apart we'd spend some months together abroad.

Leading up to the trip, I was bombarded with phone calls about travel plans. Being more of a "whim" person, I really didn't enjoy the process of preparing a vacation with a "planning" type. Admittedly, had I been in charge, we probably never would have hit our first runway. But I had other things on my mind! Prom was coming up, there were dates to consider. This was my type of planning: social. In retrospect, had I been in her shoes, I would have cut all ties on our joint venture then and there for my extreme lack of contribution. But she didn't.

We landed in Turkey three days after grad night. I was missing my summer of fun for full-coverage clothing in seventy-percent humidity? I was ready to kill her. Dripping with sweat, we made it up the ten flights of stairs to our first accommodation. Not a hotel, much to my dismay (not that I could have afforded one with my savings). We were trying this new thing, couch-surfing. We were shacking up with Turkish host my sister had briefly communicated with via the Internet. We swam in the Marmara by day, clubbed by night, and melted from the heat in our sleep all morning. All was well in the month of June.

Of course, being together twenty-four seven lead to many intense, heated fights. But the fact that we were alone in a country where very few spoke English forced us to set aside our egos or face the alternative of long hours with no companionship. Most arguments, even those that ended in angry tears, were forgotten in five minutes time.

When we bid adieu to Turkey, we had no plans for our next week in Genoa. She had left our traveling dates open, our only deadline being our expected arrival at Il Leccio in Italy on July third. RyanAir flew us into the industrial part of the city just past midnight, and so began some serious problems. We had no couch-surfing hosts lined up, and after walking a few miles, luggage in tow, we had been turned out of almost every hotel. It seemed, strangely enough, the ten-percent occupancy rule didn't apply to posh European cities as it does here in the United States. Every hotel was booked, that is, with the exception of the luxurious suits we couldn't afford. Running out of options, I suggested a beach camp-out. After all, I've always felt that a traveler should be able to get up and go. Perhaps my obsession with Lord of the Rings brainwashed me into believing an un-privatized world exists, but that's how I always pictured my giant backpacking adventure. My belief in a world vision where a vagabond is free to be a vagabond was very revealing of my naïveté.

I had always known I was sheltered by comparison to Avery, but I never considered that it was my own making. I had let my parents map out every previous travel-plan for me; in fact, I had never even attempted to figure out a bus-route in my home town. As a result, I'd never comprehended what it's like to be responsible for myself, let alone someone else. Partially due to the fact that she is four years older, and partially due to the fact that she's my family, I couldn't see my lack of contribution as anything out of the ordinary. To me, it seemed natural letting her make the decisions.

She started to cry. It's not a completely unfamiliar sight, nor is it unusual that I'm the one who caused it. Somehow, it felt different. I sat there, silently wishing her to stop. Eventually she did, and then I wished she hadn't. It was the first time I realized my sister needed someone to lean on, and that someone she chose (perhaps for lack of an alternative) was me. 

While I had spent years complaining about my home-life to friends, Avery had always internalized hers, depending solely on herself to deal with all emotions. Part of her tendency is definitely her innate personality, but what I realized that night is that a part of it has always been her concern to protect me. She was reaching out to me with an invisible hand. I think she always wanted to be close to me, but never really knew how.  Unfortunately for us both, her attempts often manifested in her trying to dictate my path, which resulted in my adverse reactions to much of her advice. As for my part, I had wasted years seeing her as competition rather than as a friend. For the first time, her breakdown made her truly human to me. Her authoritarian hold vanished that night, replaced by one of complete respect, and love.

I was starting to really see my sister for the first time.
I never felt the full impact of our travels together until our paths diverged. There was no one I missed more than Avery during my months away from home. When I returned to Davis, most of my friends were still away enjoying being freshman (most of whom I was already finding it difficult to relate to anymore anyway). But She was there to pick me up at the airport, and there's no one that I would rather have seen first.
I heard it a thousand times as a kid: "You'll be best friends as adults, you wait and see!"

I thought it was a sick joke.

Who knew, They were actually right about something.