Day 3: work

“A Tale of Two Sisters”
By: Joelle Dahl

Tatiana Linda Jones

To have a loving relationship with a sister is not simply to have a buddy or a confident; it is to have a soul mate for life. ~Victoria Secunda

All she had ever wanted was to be loved by someone that she loved back. Had this ever happened? No. Was it too much to ask? She didn’t think so but apparently God did. 18-year-old Tatiana Linda Jones was just your average college freshmen with way too much on her plate and not enough time to just enjoy herself sometimes. She was a biology and chemistry double major. Not only class but also two different labs a week sucked up her time. She had met a bunch of new people but most of them were major partiers so she wasn’t very close to them because she did not want to partake in that wonderful American college student tradition. She had always been against alcohol, her mom and dad would offer her sips of their drinks (wine, beer, wine coolers…) but she had always refused not just because she already she knew she didn’t like the flavor but because it was illegal and she knew way to many facts about how bad the effects of alcohol can be for a person. She had moved across the country for college hoping that she would be able to start over and not have to deal with all the same crap that she had in high school because no one would know her which would mean that she could be whoever she wanted to be. She would no longer be another one of the guys because she was sick of that.

Amelia Jesse Jones

Sisters annoy, interfere, criticize. Indulge in monumental sulks, in huffs, in snide remarks. Borrow. Break. Monopolize the bathroom. Are always underfoot. But if catastrophe should strike, sisters are there. Defending you against all comers. ~Pam Brown

At 20 years old, Ameila Jones is the girl who has everything except for what she really wants, the boy to share it all with. She is going to school without having to take out loans, which she will pay for long into the distant future. She can speak fairly fluently two foreign languages and for these languages is able to study abroad and devote four months to each so as to make her fluency better. She has many classmates who could kill to have her life even with the boy missing from the picture. Amelia is a junior in college and spending her year in Europe. A semester in Cadiz, Spain studying the language and literature and a semester in Aix-en-Provence, France again studying the language but instead of literature she will be studying cinema history. She is enjoying her semester in Spain so very much but she keeps being reminding of the things that she is missing at home and wishes that she were with the people she loves right now both at school and at home.
She has a best friend Joshua, who had been a friend since the elementary school bus days, whom she just realized about a year ago that she has feelings for but nothing happened between them because he left for Afghanistan in October and did not want anything to happen. She spent time with him over the summer and tried to figure out what to do as she had not directly told him that she liked him. She ended up chickening out every time and so when he left for training in the middle of August, she still had yet to figure things out with him. She decided that she would not wait for him for the year that he was going to be wrong but she was also not going to look for someone to take the spot of boy in her life.

August

“Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.” – Margaret Mead

Tatiana and Amelia Jones are just two ordinary girls much like the rest of the Midwest girls of the United States. Always listened to their mom and did not talk back and enjoyed hanging out with friends but not necessarily going anywhere. Bonfires were one of their favorite pastimes. They were always enjoying each other’s company. An outsider would assume these two were best friends and had been for a long time. What the outsider would be shocked to learn after stating this observation is that the two are actually sisters. Tatiana being the younger one by two years although she is taller by multiple inches and by default then Amelia the shorter and older one. Another fact the outsider would learn is that they have not always been as close as they are today. In fact, they once were at each other’s throats day and night to the point where their parents just got sick of it and would separate them to different areas of the house until they could treat each other nicely. The outsider at this point would be completely astounded and not know what to do or say, except for to just go on his/her way because he/she did not want to be made to look stupid again.
These two have been best friends for the past couple of years now but sisters for over eighteen years. In their first years of sisterhood the two were unstoppable and it was hard to find one without the other. Anything Amelia did, Tatiana was most likely right behind her ready to try it as well. They played with each other, helped each other, and loved each other; everything was with the other one. They had a built in best friend right n the house and their mom loved every minute of it. The favorite story to tell of the two of them is of a time when the family had taken a trip out to California and was headed to the beach. The girls were walking ahead of their parents and one of them got a side ache. The other said, “here I will help you and put her arm around the other one.” There is a picture documenting this moment and it has been a popular picture ever since.
Tatiana and Amelia spent their last month together before they both started new adventures hanging out and taking part in their favorite activities whatever they may be. Amelia did the training for lifeguarding and Tatiana did training for a half marathon. The family spent as much time together as possible. Eating dinners together and going to movies were the two most popular options. Watching movies at home and going for walks or bike rides as well as just sitting around and talking at all hours of the night.
The family was split the last full week of August when Tatiana and their parents, Thomas and Jackie, had to go to California to move her into school. The departure was hard and it left Amelia at home with the girls little brother, Michael. They were going to be at home by themselves for four days. This was the first time their parents had left them home alone for longer than a few hours. Luckily one set of grandparents lived only ten minutes away. The two spent lots of time at their grandparent’s house and went out to eat with them two times that week. They were spoiled rotten by their grandparents as they always are. When Thomas and Jackie got back early in the morning of the same day that Amelia was leaving for Spain, they got to spend a few hours with her before they had to head down to the airport to send her on her way.
As Amelia walked through security, Jackie yelled her name because she thought that she was going to walk away without waving good-bye. This was the truth but that was because Amelia was fighting the tears that she did not want to shed. But she waved as her mom wanted her to and then walked to her gate after getting herself a smoothie at Caribou Coffee Shop. There she talked with her friend Chelsea until it was time to get on the plane.

TATIANA LINDA JONES

September

She is your mirror, shining back at you with a world of possibilities. She is your witness, who sees you at your worst and best, and loves you anyway. She is your partner in crime, your midnight companion, someone who knows when you are smiling, even in the dark. She is your teacher, your defense attorney, your personal press agent, even your shrink. Some days, she's the reason you wish you were an only child. ~Barbara Alpert

She met her roommates on that first day and was excited about the prospects but soon found out one of them is shyer than she is and the other two are partiers who are out until all hours every night of the weekend. All she could do was sit there and wonder what she should do as she did not want to be sitting in the room by herself but yet because of her morals she could not rationalize going to the parties with her roomies even if it did mean that they then had a safe way to get back to the dorms so that no one had to drink and drive or just sleep on the floor to sleep off the drunkenness. She did meet some friends once classes started but they all weren’t on campus on the weekends. Her best friend was a commuter and thusly was never available to hang out and do things during the week or otherwise. The other good friend she made was her neighbor so he was very easy to get a hold of but he went home on the weekends because he had decided that nothing good ever happened on the weekends at the school.
For this second friend she worked so hard to persuade him otherwise and to just stay on campus for a weekend and see that she was telling the truth. Her grandparents had a house near the campus that they wintered in. She was excited about this fact because it meant that she could get away for the weekend to this house if she wanted to. Also this friend lived very near there so he could give her a ride to the house if she wanted. He surfed at the beach near the house so she could go to the beach with him and watch him surf. She liked this thought and she liked him. She thought he might be feeling the same because when she had given him her cell phone number he had said that he put her in his phone as Tati, favorite person ever. She really hoped that something would come of this. He never used her number though. She had invited him to come to meals with them and to just send them a text if he wanted to do a meal or something but it never happened. He seemed to just think that it was a joke or something. He enjoyed eating meals by his lonesome. He never invited her or her roommates to join him. She just couldn’t figure out what was going on with that.
She was a runner and thrower for the Track team both in high school and now in college. John, her neighbor and friend, was also a runner on the team. They had started running together a lot and that was like 30 to 40 miles a week. She was in the best shape she had ever been in. Just before she left for school she had run a half marathon. She was insane in the eyes of all her family and friends but she enjoyed it and wanted to be able to eat what she wanted when she wanted which meant working out…something her sister had yet to figure out. She and John had lots of fun running and hanging out all the time but as far as she could tell he was not interested in her as she was in him. This was a disappointment but it was one that she was used to because it was the same thing that had happened with every boy that she had ever been interested in back home for the past 8 years of her life.
She wanted to go to church every Sunday because it was good for her spiritual growth as well as it relaxed her and allowed her to release a little stress. There was a service on Sunday nights on campus and she went to it every week with out fail. John went with her because he was back on campus already at that point. One week the service was cancelled so they walked to the nearest supermarket and bought bread and grape juice so as to have communion and their own little church service. It was the moments like this that she was absolutely and totally at peace with her new life at the school in this new state.

October

A sister is a gift to the heart, a friend to the spirit, a golden thread to the meaning of life. ~ Isadora James

She had joined the intramural soccer league. It’s coed and she was one of three girls on the team but one of two that actually showed up for games. She loved it and she got to play goalie again so that made things all the better. She played in the games all the time and she continued to win them with the help of her teammates. She had really impressed the boys who thought she was an amazing goalie for some reason that she could not comprehend. All she knew was that it really helped to look good when your defense rarely let the ball past them but she liked that they thought she was good. Now if only one of them would think she was cute and funny as well…now that would be a really good thing.
She had played in all the games so far and she had yet to lose a game for the team. She was very excited about the prospects for the rest of the competition and she was very proud to be the only goalie they ever put in! Then during warm ups before one of the games, the strongest kicker on the team kicked a goal on her and she hurt her wrist. She shook it off and kept going. Not wanting to let it affect her as she had done so many times before as well. An injury at the beginning of a game was not important; it could wait until the end of the game to get dealt with. She was still in tons of pain the next morning, so she decided that she would go to the trainer that afternoon after her classes to get it checked out. The trainer was pretty sure it was nothing and that she just needed to rest it and then it would get better. Tatiana being very sure that something had to be wrong more than just an internal bruise and a slight sprain decided that since she had to see a orthopedic specialist for track that day anyway she would just ask the doctor to take a look at it. She did and the doctor said that it didn’t seem to be broken but there was always a possibility because there is a bone that could be broken, which would be very dangerous if not caught.
So she went and had some x-rays taken. These did not show that the bone was broken so the doctor was called upon again. He said, “This bone if broken oftentimes does not show up on the x-rays as broken.”
Tatiana replied, “Well, this hurts so bad that it has to be something more wrong than just a minor injury that will heal itself in a few days.”
“Well we’ll set up an appointment with a specialist for you and you can talk to him or her about what the options are for figuring out what is going on and how to correct it once you figure out what is going on,” the doctor replied.
The appointment that the doctor made was not until the next week, which was not going to help anything. She was in pain and freaking out because of the issues that the doctor said it could cause. She needed to go in now not then. She called her mom and told her what was going on. Now her mom being unable to get there to comfort her and help with the situation felt really bad but did the next best thing she could. She called the office of this specialist and got her an appointment with a hand specialist instead of just a general specialist for that very day. Things were going to get taken care of in time for Tati (as her closest friends and family called her) to play in her soccer game on Sunday night…or so she hoped.

November

Sisters know the secrets inside each other's little girl hearts ... even when they're all grown up. ~Laura Ramirez

John gave her hope in the male gender again. She loved him for that. He was the older brother she had never had but had always dreamed of. Yes she had a little brother, named Michael Francis Jones, who was now taller than her and quickly on his was to being stronger but it’s just not the same. All through high school he was just this little weakling who would not have been able to do anything in the way of defending her. John was fulfilling that dream and filling the hole. She hoped that he may become more some day but she was fine with allowing him to be a best friend/big brother for the moment. They were all just settling in to the routine of college still, she understood that.
She just hoped and wished and dreamed and prayed that one day she would finally get that chance to feel what she had watched all the leading ladies in movies and books experience over the years. Especially a chance to be fought over like Bella Swan was in her favorite series, Twilight; she was a fan before it was cool just so everyone knows. To have to beautiful men such as Jacob and Edward wanting to win her heart would be absolutely amazing and would do great things for her self-esteem. This she knew but she would continue to wait. Hoping that at some point the boys would wake up and realize that they didn’t want the blonde bimbos anymore but rather someone with substance.
She knew that she was worth it; she knew that she was pretty, but she also knew that she was intelligent and that was something that most males were intimidated by. A smart girl was something that all boys were afraid of. The males of our species have egos that are very easily bruised and any small thing that shows a female as better than them is something that they want to stay away from. Tati understood this and had accepted it years ago…she had no other choice but she couldn’t help but hope that there was someone out there that would be able to get past that weak ego and take a few hits to get to know her and maybe just maybe like her as more than a friend. Alas this had yet to happen and she was now 18 seriously not many girls at the age of 18 can say they have never been in a relationship no less that they have still yet to be kissed in today’s society at least. How embarrassing.
She was an athlete by nature. She had never spent a school year without at least one sport. She was going to continue this in college. She had one sport but it took up the equivalent of two seasons. This was the first time she had been able to start the school year just relaxing and enjoying life…haha yeah right. There’s this thing called homework, which consumed all the time that would have been spent at practices and competitions in other years.
Life was great she had enough to do that she was never bored and never had time to just sit there and think about things thusly never had a chance to be homesick. The only thing that she was very upset about was the fact that her older sister was not available to talk to whenever she wanted her. Her sister, Amelia Jesse Jones, is two years older than her and a junior in college. Amelia would have been a great deal of help to Tati as she was adjusting to college life and the partying that went on around her as Amelia had very similar morals to Tati which did not include partying all the time. However as Amelia is a double foreign language major she was abroad studying in Spain for the semester and will be abroad again in the spring in France. Thus when Tati wanted to talk to her big sister she had to write on her facebook wall or send her an email. It was not the ideal situation for someone who wanted to talk to someone to get a little piece of mind about the situation at hand.
She was able to get through it though and tell her sister of her triumph after the fact and make her feel good by telling her that it was her that she had wanted to talk to in her time of need. They had been really close when they were younger but that had fallen apart when Amelia had started kindergarten at age 5. This friendship had become very weak and stayed that way until the end of Amelia’s senior year of high school when the two girls all of a sudden started to gain a better appreciation of each other again. So by the time Tati went off to college exactly two years later, the two were tighter than they had been in years and the separation was a hardship for the whole family.

December

“There can be no situation in life in which the conversation of my dear sister will not administer some comfort to me.” – Mary Worley Montagu

Tati on the other side of the ocean was having just as many problems with the separation. She had so many times wanted to pick up the phone and call her big sister to get some peace of mind about this or that but she could not and it was one of the hardest things she had ever had to deal with. It was frustrating to not be able to do so. She had been able to get through it and understand things herself but that sister contact might have been nice. She decided that she wanted to work on the relationship she and her sister had but at the same time she knew that she needed to work on the here and now as well. That meant that working on the relationship she and Amelia had was going to have to take a back burner.
In the past few days she had not only gotten to know John better but she had also met new people and taken care of her wrist situation all on her own. Amelia was not the only one doing some growing up. She was in love with the feeling of accomplishment that she felt and she knew that it was going to continue throughout her life. All she had to do was continue to do what she felt was right and rely on God with all her heart soul and mind. She knew that these two things she could do.

January
A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves—a special kind of double. ~Toni Morrison
February
A sister is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost. ~Marion C. Garretty
March
If you don't understand how a woman could both love her sister dearly and want to wring her neck at the same time, then you were probably an only child. ~Linda Sunshine
April
A sister is always there to defend you no matter what. ~Felicity Martin
May
What sets sisters apart from brothers and also from friends is a very intimate meshing of heart, soul and the mystical cords of memory. ~Carol Saline


AMELIA JESSE JONES

September

Husbands come and go; children come and eventually they go. Friends grow up and move away. But the one thing that's never lost is your sister. ~ Gail Sheeny

Amelia is not the most popular girl ever. She is not a partier and not a big drinker, she has morals stronger than most her age. These things put her on the outside of most groups. She was hoping that would be different here in Spain but apparently she was wrong. The majority of the group took the first chance they had to go out for drinks even though they were all jet-lagged. Because of this outsiderness she has found only two and a half friends in this country. A girl in her program named Eloise and a girl from Canada named Katrina.
Eloise is a great friend but she can be a bit standoffish sometimes. She and Amelia hit it off on the second day of the orientation and stuck together because they were the only ones that were not out seven days of the week. They walked around town exploring their new home, they climbed the biggest hill in the city just for exercise, and the view was an added bonus and went and sat on the beautiful beach. Anything to get out of the house and enjoy the gorgeous summer like weather that the city was providing them. Class was only 4 hours out of the day and there was barely any homework since it was only one class for all of those hours. They very quickly became close and were able to talk to each other about anything and everything. The only issue was that Eloise does not want to travel and being Amelia’s only friend that meant Amelia did not have anyone to travel with.
Amelia found out about trips through the university that she could go on, so she did. The first one was to Malaga, another coastal town nearby. She met many new people on this trip and really enjoyed the trip as a whole. One of the people she met was Katrina, a Canadian girl who was in a similar place as Amelia only she was not in a private program so she had a better chance at meeting more young people. Katrina and Joelle hung out the entire weekend except for when their nationalities separated them. They continued to hang out as the weeks progressed, becoming better and better friends.

October

"There's a special kind of freedom sisters enjoy. Freedom to share innermost thoughts, to ask a favor, to show their true feelings. The freedom to simply be themselves." ~ Author Unknown

Amelia was having a hard time because of the friends issue already and then she started to have problems with her host family as well. Her madre insisted that she needed to eat way more than she would have ever eaten for like five meals at home for just one meal and when she did not eat all the food that was on her plate her madre assumed that she didn’t like it. This was not the case at all it was simply that Joelle did not have the room in her stomach to eat it and the fruit that came afterwards. Her padres also seemed to think that it was a must to go out and party all the time. She thought that she had explained that she didn’t like it well enough that they would understand but apparently not as they were still insisting she should be going out.
Eventually she realized she was not going to find anyone to go with her somewhere during Fall Break at least not that was going to want to go places that she was not going during her Spring Break with her French class friend, Amanda. So she talked to her mom and said mom I need you to come and travel with me. I need you to be my mom but also a friend. That is all it took the next day, her mom booked her plane ticket and found a cruise for the two of them to go on. Two weeks later they were on a train from Cadiz to Barcelona ready for a week and a half of mommy daughter time. They spent the night in a pension, which was right on the main street of Barcelona and then spent the next day on the hop on hop off bus. They hit all the major sights of the city in less than 7 hours.
Amelia and her mom really enjoyed their time together. Both were thoroughly content with what they had done and did not feel like there was anything missing. They both will remember it for the rest of their lives. The day in Marseille during which, they had no idea what to do and ended up riding a Disneyland like train to the Notre Dame de la Garde. The days in Italy where neither could speak the language and had any idea what was going on, the tour of Pomeii and the walking tour of Sicily. The day in Tunisia where they got a taxi tour with two of their new friends from Australia; they got to see famous ancient Roman ruins and a gorgeous fishing village. The day in Palma where they again did a taxi tour to all of the major tourist sights and then found some coca cola for mom. All of it would be remembered. It was all well documented in photos as well. Amelia took picture after picture of everything.
The dinner table at which they were seated could not have been more ideal. They had two couples that are empty nesters and a couple of ladies from Sweden. They were all extremely nice and easy to make conversation with. The wife of one of the couples even offered Amelia a job on the farm that she and her husband own…now that is not something that Amelia would every be interested in. She is so definitely not a dirt under the fingernails kind of girl. The waiter who was from Thailand was extremely cute and young and was constantly flirting with Amelia. She was flirting back but not openly enough for anything to have come of the flirtation. It was just for fun anyway. Nothing would have happened from it anyway.
Once the cruise was over Amelia and her mom went back to Cadiz where they enjoyed all the touristy things around the city as well as a day on the beach. The sun felt very good considering how cold they were in Italy the week before. Mom also got to meet Katrina. Amelia wanted her to meet Eloise but she could not get a hold of her to have them meet each other. Her mom stayed with her at her homestay. Her padres were ecstatic to meet her mom and often got so excited that they forgot that mom did not understand any Spanish. The time was successful and the two parted tearfully knowing that they would see each other in just a little over two months.
Amelia went back to classes in full study mode because there was only a week before midterms. She worked on papers and presentations and reading books and notes and just general studying to get things done. She could only hope that they would all pay off in the end. She got fifty pages of her Spanish novel read for her literature class in less than two days and got it all analyzed and put into an outline as well. She typed all of her notes into word documents as well. The first weekend after break she literally had no life. All she did was do homework and hang out with her family. They think that she is a boring student who does not have a life but that is her choice. She would rather be at home than out getting drunk…that is not a crime. So what she is a homebody? There are lots of those in this world. Maybe just not that study abroad in Spain apparently probably not those study abroad in general actually. Homebodies like to sit at home and hang out with family and just relax, not jet set across the world.
The week of midterms flew by quickly but the exams were frustrating because they required studying every night since there was only one a day. Amelia was honestly studying every day of the week that week (except Friday…her program does not have class on Fridays). She really enjoyed herself but it was slightly frustrating that she did not get to have any fun ever. The beauty of the exams being done is that she now did not have to study for them again until the end of the semester for the finals! If only that meant there were going to be no presentations and papers to happen in that time. That would be luck but alas no…there would be a minimum of one presentation and one paper in each class. Wonderful…just what every students favorite thing to do is.
Oh well…she is here to study not to have fun and lay on the beach every day even though that would be nice. It is what they (all the students) would ultimately like to be doing, as well as traveling to other places in Spain and Europe during their spare time. Most of them had traveled at least one or two weekends of the semester that far and they would eventually be going on trips as a program as well. Just not until November. Eloise and Amelia were becoming better friends again. They were doing two presentations together as well as going to do things such as climb the highest hill together just for exercise. This is something that both their madres thought they were nuts for doing but alas that is what they wanted to do especially since their madres are the ones that tried to shove food down their throats a minimum of three times a day, oftentimes it was more like four or five.
The weekend following midterms was Halloween weekend. This meant that on Monday it was All Saints Day and there would be no school as in Spain it is a national holiday. This was nice because it meant a four-day weekend. Amelia spent the weekend relaxing and taking time to hang out with friends. She went up to Katrina’s house and they tried out the recipes that Amelia had found on the Internet as well as went to a movie at the discount theater near the house. Then she lay on her bed and watched movies all day on Sunday to recuperate from the late night before going out for Halloween that night with some other people. The scene was extremely lame that night so they did not stay out very long at all. That was ok with her. She had not wanted to go out in the first place.

November

"Sisters are for sharing laughter and wiping tears." ~ Author Unknown

The next day she got up around eleven in the morning and got dressed at breakfast and did homework until it was time for lunch, which was pretty much all fish so she had a “special meal” of leftover pasta. This was fine with her. Noelia and Ivan her host sister and brother-in-law were there for lunch but none of the other family were. This seemed weird to Amelia because all she had ever heard about was how fiestas were days when the family was all together yet there were days where the whole family was assembled that were just normal days and today they were not.
The only thing that was missing from her host family was her siblings. She had never realized how much they were a part of her life until she left for college freshmen year and then again now she is realizing how much she takes them for granted. When all of a sudden someone who has always been there is not any more we as humans go into shock and have issues remembering how to cope without that someone or something. I have found that it is easier to live life not missing those people but cherishing the memories and remembering that you will see them again. Being sad for time unending is not the way to deal with life and you are not going to get any where by doing so. I prefer to let things fall as they may and live each day to the fullest, knowing that each day is not promised but a gift.
So many times this semester Amelia had wanted to pick up her cell phone and call her sister but she could not. It was way to expensive to do that. She would have to be ok with the writing on walls and sending emails that had sufficed for the past few years. It was only four months. They could make it. It would make the time they got to spend with each other at Christmas that much more special. She could not wait to hear all about her little sister’s experiences at college. She knew they would be great. She missed her little brother too but the bond between the two of them had never been as strong as the bond between the two girls. Amelia being a girlier girl than Tati, Tati and Michael had their sports that they bonded over as well as their hatred for most romantic things. The two had been the best of friends for years.
The family style of the Jones’ is one that is become more and more rare as the years go by. Each of the children knows how important family should be in their life and they keep it as such. This model is found very often in other parts of the world but in the United States it is a hard to find thing. Spain, Amelia had found out was a majorly family oriented and did everything based around how things were going in their family. Where we would send off our grandparents to the nursing home when they start to need around the clock care, the Spaniards take them into their home and make sacrifices to figure out how the care for them will happen.
Friends were a different story here too. Most Spaniards stay within a fifty-mile radius of where they grew up. This makes it very easy to form a group of friends as a young child and keep it through out your whole life. This is very nice for the young people of the area but for people who come into the environment later in life it is very hard because the groups are tight knit and breaking into the is almost impossible and takes tons of work. For this reason, most study abroad students never make Spanish friends and also never get to practice their Spanish with young people because they do not have the time nor the want to put forth that much effort just to have these friends for a semester.
The program tried to help this issue by supplying the option of intercambios, which are Spanish students that want to practice their English as well as help Spanish as a second language students practice their Spanish. One class period was even spent in intercambios so as to jump-start the process. This allowed the students to meet a few Spanish students but the effort to keep the relationship going was not worth it for most of them.
Amelia was in this situation. She had met a very nice girl who shared a name with her sister who she wanted to be friends with but she was not very sure she wanted to put the effort forth, so she continued to talk to her on facebook but that was as far as it ever went. Help with homework she went to Tatiana. She wondered about a cultural aspect, she went to Tatiana. It was always the same thing…write on her wall or sends her a message and get a response with in 24 hours. It was not a friendship yet it was not just a thing of the past either. Had either one wanted to get something going they could have put forth the effort and it would have gone swimmingly however neither felt that the little over two months that they would be friends were worth the effort of those first couple of weeks.
Friends and sisters have one thing in common. They do not have to be numerous as long as they are true. Amelia was dealing with that one step at a time. Sisters are not numerous for her that was for sure…she had one, Tati but she was definitely a true one. No matter how mean or neglectful she had been in other times Tati was there at the end of it still want to be just like her big sister. Then they started to get closer but she was still a little mean every once in a while but she was still there. There was never anything that could end that bond. Amelia was glad that she had that bond and felt bad for the people who never got to feel it. Then there were friends…she had two that she could really count on available to her at the moment and that was ok because she knew they were true friends ones that could possibly still be friends years from now when they were all done with school and had families of their own.
The one she wanted to be there though was her sister. Tati and she had only talked once over SKYPE since she had left and they had chatted on facebook once or twice but that was it. It was forever or at least it seemed like it was forever. She could not believe that it was that hard. She had never realized how attached she was. No one ever does until they are not around the thing they are attached too. It was just as well though; they would eventually both be living in different places with different lives. This was good practice for that. It was supposed to happen or at least that is what she was telling herself.

December
"For there is no friend like a sister, in calm or stormy weather, to cheer one on the tedious way, to fetch one if one goes astray, to lift one if one totters down, to strengthen whilst one stands." ~ Christina G. Rossetti
January
"You should never look down on a sister except to pick her up."
Author Unknown
February
"Sisters share the scent and smells - the feel of a common childhood."
Pam Brown
March
Sisters function as safety nets in a chaotic world simply by being there for each other. ~ Carol Saline
April
Of two sisters, one is always the watcher, one the dancer. ~ Louise Gluck
May
A loyal sister is worth a thousand friends. ~ Marian Eigerman