ciao for now

I wish a fond goodbye to my sister today. Her stay in London is, for the time being, over, but unlike the last time, it won’t be an age before I see her again; between this visit and the last, we hadn’t seen one another in over a year, and for someone to whom I feel so close, this wasn’t an ideal state of affairs.

I’ve never been in any doubt over how much affection I have for her, but there have been times when I have wondered whether the two of us really know each other anymore; she has been living in California for nearly a decade, and for much of that time most of our interaction has been by telephone, and not really all that often. The result was that when we did speak, our respective situations had always shifted; one didn’t know exactly what to be asking the other, not that our conversations were ever based on formula, but it felt less than natural than I, perhaps either of us, would have liked.

Us and our trivial insecurities. Having her here has been refreshing; we’ve re-established a measure of something long since diminished between us. I like knowing that I can interrupt her while she works, to find out this, to offer that, to make baser, biological noises across the analogue void, or to be bugged, in return, when I really can’t afford the time to talk, covered, as I can be, in biohazardous waste.

There is no reason to justify our need to communicate; as brother and sister, we owe each other nothing. It’s reassuring to know that little has really changed. Like, d‘uh.