On the eve of my 21st birthday, I sat in the padded recliner chairs of the Ann Arbor Cinemark with two of my best friends, nursing our cherry Cokes as we watched “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” for a second time. Partly because it was a Sunday night, partly because I was the first of all of us to turn 21 — bar hopping is no good when no one else can get in — and partly just to see Tom Blyth again. After his last-ditch effort to save Lucy Gray from a vat of snakes, my best friends both turned to me, whisper-yelling-but-really-more-like-yelling “Happy Birthday” despite the four other focused movie watchers.
Once Tom graced us with what is arguably his best line of the film — “Snow lands on top” — we proceeded to the 7-Eleven on South Forest Avenue. At 2 a.m., nearly 18 hours before I’d be 21, I purchased a Green Apple Beatbox with my newly legal ID and chugged it to the beat of “Pump it Up” by Endor as snow slid down the windows of the car.
My usual sense of nostalgia was there — the sense that time was slowly, carefully slipping out of my grasp, and I was marching endlessly forward — as it was with all my birthdays, but I thought I’d done a good job of avoiding it. Even though my TikTok feed was filled with girls posing next to cakes with teary eyes, proclaiming that “hot girls cry on their birthdays,” there were no tears this birthday. No spurts of melancholy at the loss of my childhood, at the startling realization that I would never again live with my friends on the fourth floor of South Quad Residence Hall.
It wasn’t until I sat in my drafty room, reading a card from best friends, that I noticed the silence surrounding me. The only noise that signified my first 24 hours of legal adulthood was the hum of my radiator. Though my parents had FaceTimed earlier to check in, there was no singing, nor barking dogs, here in Ann Arbor. This birthday was the first year I had ever had my own room, and not having my sister’s steady stream of chatter in the background felt wrong — like something was missing.
My sister, Caroline, and I are 11 months apart, meaning we’re Irish twins. When we were kids, I thought this little factoid was the best thing ever, made even more appealing by my grandmother’s Irish roots. Though it took me a second to get a hold of the term — when a woman once asked my dad in Costco if we were twins, I proudly, and mistakenly, said “yes” before he could respond — I loved that I had this special label to apply to our relationship. “Sister” seemed too informal, too distant; “twin” was factually wrong. With “Irish twins,” we could maintain our individuality while adding on a degree of closeness not afforded to every other pair of sisters.
That degree of closeness extended to our birthdays. For nearly half of my life, we’d share some element of our birthday celebration. In the beginning, I thought I had struck gold. I got to be sung to by my grandparents and family on her birthday, and, usually, even got a present, simply because she was my younger sister. Seven-year-old me felt like she hit the lottery.
More importantly, though, I got to share her special day with her, and likewise, she was a part of mine. When I was 3 years old, one of my aunts gifted me a baby doll that came in a pair of two. One for me, one for her. I was sharing the one day a year dedicated to me — to my existence — before I could even conceptualize it.
These shared birthdays weren’t always perfect. On Caroline’s 6th birthday, after we had just moved into our new house, I retired to the kitchen table to sob while everyone clapped for her. I wasn’t sure then, and I’m still not sure now, why I was so broken up. Jealousy at the sheer fact it was her birthday and not mine, I’m sure, but all I knew was that I couldn’t stand to watch her smile down at her cake, glasses sliding down her nose. I could have sworn she’d just been using eye patches yesterday — the same way my youngest brother was babbling words in his high chair, though he’d only just said his first words.
Maybe I knew that one day we wouldn’t share a room anymore, conferring late into the night about which name to assign each doll in the “American Girl Doll” catalog. That we wouldn’t listen to “Hamilton” on loop for literal days or steal each other’s mascara, that we wouldn’t sit next to each other in the viola section of the orchestra, that we wouldn’t battle for who got to be “Jazzy” on Just Dance 3.
That impermanence scared me when I was 6, and it scares me even more now to know that I will have to exist for longer periods than college semesters without her by my side. At some point, I will share a room with a significant other instead of her. I’ll coax my future children back to sleep instead of her when my reaction to the final chapter of “The Mark of Athena” by Rick Riordan shocks me. At some point, I’ll have finally, officially left my childhood bedroom, and my new one will not be cluttered with Sonny Angel dolls or various flavors of Summer Fridays lip balms.
There will come a point in my life when new people don’t immediately associate Charlotte with Caroline, and that alone is enough to send me reeling. We are still sisters, of course, and our relationship is not invalidated by not sharing the same 120 square feet of space. But whenever we trade tales about our nights out, about her afternoons in her sorority house and my back-to-back midterms, I cannot shake the distinct realization that we are slowly diverging in two different ways. We are building different communities, different homes and lives, and I am not there to see hers materialize.
We are the same age for exactly 23 days a year: Nov. 11 to Dec. 4. We share the same initials and took nearly the same high school extracurriculars (save for my dalliance with lacrosse and field hockey). She is the “purple” sister, and I am the “pink” sister. She was born knowing me, and I was born with the promise of being a sister.
As our three younger brothers arrived in rapid succession, Caroline and I were a unit. We were together, hand in tiny hand, begging to be in the same after-school program in pre-K and kindergarten, respectively, simply because we wanted to pretend we were in the same grade for an afternoon. At the local bookstore in elementary school, we both wanted to enter a drawing for a mini version of her American Girl Doll. After she stuffed her paper entry slip into the wooden box, I wrote one entry for myself, and then three others for her.
The tradition of shared birthdays faded away once my grandparents passed and we reached middle school. We fought, as all sisters do, trading vicious barbs before silently fuming for 20 minutes until one of us broke the silence by asking if the other wanted to play Animal Crossing: New Leaf. As I chased after honors English classes and she dove into social soirees, we gained a little bit of distance. Nothing extreme, but enough to make it a bit awkward between us — she couldn’t relate to my need for validation in every possible honors society I could find, and I was quietly envious of how easily she could connect with the other violists in our orchestra section. Combined with the variety of other high school exams, events and responsibilities, we were quieter during the family car rides out to dinner.
That distance was even more pronounced when I came to the University of Michigan a year later, and she got ready to attend Michigan State. We couldn’t even be there for each other’s respective move-ins, resulting in slightly awkward goodbye hugs and “I’ll see you in six weeks” in our living room. During my freshman year move-in, as we pulled out of the driveway, my mom informed me that Caroline had started crying as soon as we shut the front door. I tried to focus on the trees whizzing past the car, turning my head and trying to blink fast enough to clear my vision.
Once we were both solidly off to college, the birthdays just weren’t the same. During my freshman year, we trotted out to Jolly Pumpkin as a family, and I offered her the last of my complimentary beignets from the waitress. Her freshman year, we hugged in the East Lansing Buddy’s parking lot before her boyfriend drove her and her friends back to their dorm. This year, she spent her birthday at her boyfriend’s fraternity formal, texting us scattered updates throughout the night in the family group chat. I made sure to post for her birthday as early as I could on Instagram.
Sometimes, I get the nagging feeling that I don’t know what’s going on in her life. That I don’t know her — at least, not like I used to. We text semiregularly and send TikToks of cats back and forth, of course, but I don’t know all the names of her friends. I don’t know her exact class schedule. On a rational level, I know we’re both busy college students trying to stay afloat in the never-ending barrage of midterms, but it’s hard to think straight when the stack of moments I’m not there to share with her continues to grow.
Holed up in the Hatcher stacks one quiet Wednesday evening, after watching and rewatching her latest Snapchat private story detailing where she plans to go out tonight and her latest iteration of her Taylor Swift-themed collage for a class, I am struck with the fear that this is what our future will look like. This is what our relationship will be relegated to once we’re off on our postgrad adventures — me feeling the pulse of her life via Instagram posts and FaceTimes.
Over Spring Break, while she was homebound for a few weeks after a nasty ankle sprain, our brothers and I laid on the couch, watching Michigan basketball blow yet another lead in the second half. I was scrolling through my mom’s Facebook — a meticulous archive of nearly every birthday since the age of 5, with plenty of throwback photos and horrific middle school memories — and had landed on a picture of the two of us as babies. We were perched in a laundry basket, smiling and grabbing at each other’s arms. Someone shut a door upstairs. She leaned over the pillows towards me.
“You should come up for my birthday. We can go to the bars and stuff.”
I looked at her and nodded, my heart squeezing almost imperceptibly.
“Deal.”
Statement Columnist Charlotte Parent can be reached at cmparent@umich.edu.