1201-34
Richel Burkley-Harris
Narrative Essay
Sydney and I haven’t always been the closest of sisters. While there were moments of solidarity between us, they were few and far between, and we spent the majority of our childhoods scorning each other. I was born six years after her in 1995, to a different father (one who wasn’t kind to either of us, but especially not to her); and that fact alone caused our complaints of “she’s not my real sister” to bellow through the house. Now, I’ve always sort of idolized Sydney; she was stubborn, strong, and never backed down from anything; she was the type of sibling who would meet a school bully in the back of an elementary school playground and beat them down the rusty red slide, had she found …show more content…
I begged and pleaded for her to let me come with them, but she was too embarrassed by me back then and declined, leaving me to stay at home with our grandmother. I was determined to prove myself, however, so I snuck out of the house only a few minutes after, and trailed behind them on bike for ten full minutes before getting caught. When Sydney did realize I was right on her tail, she immediately called grandma, who was in a complete panic over her missing grandchild, and biked home with me.
We had this sort of ‘push-pull’ relation to each other, probably for a good fifteen years, where we would want to do exactly what the other was doing, but be incredibly spiteful at her for being a copycat. I would find out what games Sydney played on the computer and play the same ones, while she would get invested in the TV shows I liked and watch them in solitude. It was a stupid game, truthfully, but it was one we knew well. We played along with it because even though we had so many things in common, there was a huge wall of strain that separated us from really being friends.
Until one weekend, we tore it …show more content…
We got up to our room and found a nest of moths swarming around our door (something that we joked about the entire trip). Throwing our suitcases on the bed, we quickly got dressed into our dorky garbs and took the first bus to the convention hotel, only three blocks away. The hotel was pretty average-sized; not necessarily expensive, but definitely much larger and fancier than the one we were staying in. There were huge crowds of people wearing every colour imaginable, dressed in fuzzy animal ears and oversized chain pants, several recognizable characters dressed on top of unknown faces; it was a madhouse that you would want to be in. We were checked in within a few minutes and handed our flashy badges showing that we belonged here, and started down the nerd-infested hallway. The surroundings were almost too much to take in - staring down the long stretch of hallway gave you eyefuls of art galleries, cosplay contests, karaoke competitions, merchandise displays, anything you could imagine. The overblown sounds of indistinct chattering and laughter filled the entire hotel, the scent of sweat and fresh sticky rise assailed the