The loneliness of love

Other peoples, that is.

My sister is in love. And not in that first flush of giddy infatuation. She is in the deep, mutual, obvious kind that we all wish for, where she stands next to her boyfriend, and they look at each other like no one else is there in that second of their gaze. It's a beautiful, subtle thing to witness, especially because my sister deserves this love so much, she has the bottomless heart of a puppy dog, and the ferocious protectiveness of a momma bear. She has found her footing with a wonderful fellow, and I believe what they have is real and maybe even forever.

And I'm jealous.

I'm not sure what I'm jealous of more, her finding the kind of love we all dream of, or of my losing a part of her to a boy. My sister has always been a piece of my backbone. When we were kids, when we were desperate and lonesome and made fun of at school, when we were losers and felt ugly and angry and far too normal, we were each other's everything, everything that was missing from our peers and parents. We've often joked that mashed together, we'd be the perfect woman. And then she moved out with a boyfriend. They lived together for four years, and when they broke up, she moved to England.

It was hard living without her in close proximity. But I learned to be my own person, on my own two feet and all my pieces of backbone have been fused together by my own blowtorch of independance. We stayed close, but it was different than before. The scars of severed inseperability were still there. Then, last year, we decided to live together. I immediately harboured daydreams of times past, us sitting up late into the night talking and realizing how night-and-day we are. Us going on bad dates and laughing about them, borrowing clothes and watching girlie movies.

But then she fell in love.

When friends or loved ones fall in love, it feels like the end of childhood. Of days when you were needed in an all-encompassing capacity, when it was us-against-them. It's a different kind of coupling, obviously. Your lover, ideally, becomes your best friend. They are the outside world seeping in to your private domain. A lover carries you away to a universe of two on a rusty bicycle. And leaves the sister in the swath of the romantic abduction feeling like days of scraped knees and hairstyles copied out of magazines, movie star crushes and Kool-Aid are now the sole property of memory.

I guess love ushers in adulthood. Not just for those involved, but for the ones surrounding it as well. She's in front of me now, she's a sign of things to come, of good things happening to good people, of the rewards to risking and daring to love and be vulnerable. And all I can do is watch, partly wistful, and pull the thin coat of lonesomeness around me. Hope and memory will keep me warm.