Something to note about my sister, Natalie, is that she is the sweetest person you will ever meet, and she has a sister, me, who isn’t. This has been true from the very beginning. She’s two and a half years older than me, two and a half years kinder than me, but at least ten and a half years less cynical than me. My sister is the overcoming, piercing sunlight that heats the windows and warms the floors. I’ve always felt like the chocolate that’s been left out in the sun too long and become a little too messy to be bothered with. 

When Natalie was about five, and I must’ve been two and a half, she hosted a formal dinner of mud pies and plastic food in the backyard. She wore her favorite puffy little princess dress, did her hair, and set the kid-sized plastic picnic table to look just like she’d seen our indoor table look, but with the touch of a little clear cup filled with water and too-short dandelions that sort of bobbed around on top of the water. I wore whatever I’d slept in and probably had knots in my hair. She dragged me out with a blossoming, sun-shining little smile on her face. 

I sat and fidgeted while Natalie pretended to finish cooking dinner in her play kitchen. She was humming a song I’m sure she made up, and I was slumped down staring into the grass and thinking of all the places I could be instead. I gazed into her little clear cup of dandelions and watched them bob around. I put my finger in and swirled the water around a little. Then I plunged my whole hand into the water while her back was turned, fished out all the dandelions, tipped the cup into the grass, and set the dry cup full of dandelions where it had been. She whipped around, still singing, to deliver a mud pie to the table, noticed her emptied cup, said, “Huh!” and danced the cup over to the hose and sprayed it full of water. I giggled at Natalie’s gullibility, and when she replaced it, I waited for her to turn around, and I did it again. And again, and again. My parents say that they watched from the kitchen and snickered with me when Natalie ran to refill the cup every time without ever suspecting her little sister. 

As I grew up, Natalie was my best friend. She lit the way for me. I didn’t feel like I was in her shadow, but in the wake of her sunlight. I hardly needed to make friends because Natalie had so many to spare that they wound up in my life, too. 

The summer before she left for college, I started to wonder why I was so unlike Natalie. She was 17 and a half, I was 15. She had a fully bloomed sun-shining smile, and I was her little sister who made people laugh by being unduly mean to someone so nice. It didn’t faze her; she was all love. For the first time, it bothered me that she was such a bright spot in the world, and that I wasn’t. 

When she was gone, I was alone. I felt like a dark spot without her. I tried to become the Natalie that I was missing; I tried to talk and act like she would’ve if she’d still been there, and it was exhausting. It felt like something was wrong with me for walking through the high school that Natalie had once shone in and not exuding the same radiance. 

I came to a realization the year that I was 15 and a half and Natalie was 18 and in college: I wasn’t her. She was the sunshine, and I wasn’t. When I slumped back and gave up hope, I began to breathe a little easier. I became more relaxed around the people I really cared about when I wasn’t trying to be the sunshine, and some of them got close. They got as close to me as Natalie was. When I didn’t expect my life to be like the sunshine, I didn’t feel like the melted chocolate left out to get sticky. I felt like the moonlight: the sunshine’s equal opposite. So I began to cast my own faint light until the clouds dissipated and I was my own entity apart from my sun-shining sister.

The music she listened to and I overheard all those years was bright, but the music I discovered myself was beautiful and haunting to me. I stopped forcing sweet romantic comedies on myself and found beauty in profound, offbeat movies. I put aside her old books, dug into my own, and finally felt like I was home when I delved into Edgar Allen Poe’s dismal works. I found abyssal patches in the world that cut into my soul the way that Natalie’s bright things must have always done for her.

Today, Natalie is 20 and I’m 17 and a half. She dragged me outside for a picnic under the beaming sun. She set it up perfectly and made sure I dressed perfectly. I sat and basked in her sunlight until the sky turned orange and the sunlight turned to moonlight and I felt like I could melt away into the dark and be more at home than ever. I’ve kept my sun-shining sister beside me all the way. When there’s love between two opposites, there’s a swirl of color, because at the times of day when the sunlight and moonlight are closest, there is always either a sunrise or sunset.