Jessai Flores

A pencil hangs on our kitchen wall, secured by a loop of red string, held down by layers of Scotch tape. My mother used it to track our heights — my sister’s and mine. Every month, she’d place a ruler over our heads and dash a streak of graphite onto the beige plaster. This ritual always went the same way. I’d tiptoe; she’d notice and jokingly chastise me. Over the years the markings covered the wall until there was no space for more. 

My sister is four years older than me. Our birthdays are only five days apart, and I always cherished that short stretch of January when our ages were closer than usual. I imagined we were closer then, that my momentary maturity might narrow the gap dividing us. She doesn’t know this, but I tiptoed to inflate my height for the same reason. I wanted to catch up to her. I wanted to understand my sister — to look at the world through her eyes. 

This wish was rooted in an uneasy and invisible tension that perhaps only I felt. In spite of our love for each other, I’d always felt strangely disconnected from my sister. At times, we simply seemed to live in separate worlds. There were rarely subjects we related to each other on. Our conversations exposed this; at the dinner table, she’d bring up her boyfriend or complex, constantly evolving friend group, and in response I could only nod in confused agreement. I had no basis for understanding her romantic and platonic entanglements, or indeed any social dynamic beyond trading hockey cards on the playground. She had direction and lofty goals to chase, while I had no idea what I wanted out of life. It was as if we were scrambling up the same mountain, with her always staying a step out of reach. And even when she turned around to extend a hand, I would miss, catching only empty air. 

Amidst the chaos of my first semester of high school, it was a big day when my pencil mark inched above hers for the first time. I had placed my hopes in this instant. I trusted that a physical change would give way to an interpersonal evolution. But by then, my sister was already in university, thousands of miles away. 

So I never had my eureka moment; there wasn’t any single conversation or interaction that severed the fence between my sister and me. But each FaceTime call, each visit back home or to Baltimore and each gray streak on the “height wall” softened the boundary until it melted into oblivion. When I visit her now, our relationship feels easy and content. In many ways, we’re surprisingly similar. They — STEM majors — say that graphite is formed out of countless layers of graphene, thin hexagonal structures of pure carbon. Every time my mother scratched a mark on that yellowed wall, hundreds of layers were lost forever. Maybe we’re like pencils, and she’s shed her layers, or I’ve grown mine. Or maybe there’s no metaphor, and we just needed time.