As a child, I had an affinity for games, so much so that I turned everything into one. The one I played the most, my least favorite, tallied the time that it would take until I saw my siblings again.
This was no hide-and-seek play date in the park. Nobody would come to find me crouched behind the big yellow slide, waiting in anticipation. Nobody would win.
Instead, I sat restlessly on the foot of my bed, counting down from 60 and totaling each minute spent without them. Losing my place was common. Resetting the tally after a visit with them wasn’t.
It was a race against time and I was the tortoise. Yet, I always returned to it throughout the years.
60… 59… 58… 57… 56…
I was 9 years old when I was separated from my siblings. Following my mother’s new marriage, the game quickly became a way for me to cope with the sudden loss.
It wasn’t grief, but it was the closest comparable thing.
All at once, my older brother moved in with our father and my half-sister moved in with hers. My mom then took herself, her new husband and me to a city several hours away from all I knew.
As the distance between our family stretched upon miles and miles, tension rose.
The transition from having a tight bond to that of pure strain was extremely difficult. A dynamic that had once been so lively morphed to silence and with that came a new feeling of bitter isolation.
In my most vulnerable states, with wet eyes and red cheeks, I would step foot into my siblings’ untouched bedrooms, akin to picturesque movie sets. They were too perfect to be real.
Their memory foam mattresses formed sunken holes in the shape of my prepubescent body.
On the days spent napping in their faux bedrooms, I choked on the scent of fresh linen and detergent. It never smelled like them. Not like it should’ve been.
55… 54… 53… 52… 51…
As my teenage years began to stack, the well of hope ran dry. The game grew to be tiresome, so when I was 17, I stopped playing.
It was then that I also started to acknowledge the effects of our distant relationships.
Small talk replaced the stale sounds of adolescent giggles. We became strangers, in every sense of the word.
After all, I didn’t know them anymore. I only knew the children I had grown up with.
They were no longer rambunctious kids. They were full-fledged adults with lives unbeknownst to me. Soon enough my brother surpassed my height and ditched his race-car driving dreams while my sister outgrew her angsty love for vampires.
The disconnect between my old perception of them and the people that they had become consumed my life.
I looked to external places for help such as therapy, music and movies but nothing shared a similar experience.
The closest community that I could find was through the kids with parental issues.
Those who struggle with abandonment fit snugly under the label of “daddy issues” and people with an insecure sense of self can be thrown into the category of “mommy issues.”
But when it comes to people like me, where do I fit in?
The answer: nowhere.
Finding ways to mend my hollowness was a learning curve. Eventually, I found solace in the relationships I could nurture, the ones that I could live through.
I jumped at any opportunity to be a loving older sister, or in a sense, a protective big brother.
From braiding my friends’ hair to threatening to fight their toxic boyfriends, I started taking on the roles I so heavily missed while having siblings.
It wasn’t a cure-all, but it was a start.