Someone once told me that Taylor Swift’s song “Last Kiss” feels like the time in your life when you no longer live with your siblings you once shared a home, life and everything with.
Now every time I listen to it, I sob.
My family has always been a little different; a special kind of close. My mom and her sister married brothers. My mom met my dad, which subsequently led to my aunt meeting my uncle, and the rest was history. You may think this is ordinary and maybe it is, but I always felt that it made my life just a little bit more special.
Let me paint the picture for you. We start with a three-bedroom modest house in the suburbs, and a family of three moves in. Not so long after that another family of three moves in, that’s six people under one roof. Fast forward several years and another kid comes along, that’s seven. A year after that comes another kid, that’s eight. One more quick year after that, and we’re finally at nine people in a three bedroom— and I emphasize—modest house in a Connecticut suburb.
That may sound suffocating, impossible and even unnecessary, but growing up, I would not have changed it for anything.
Despite only having one brother, I have four siblings. Growing up together, side by side, and being the oldest made me who I am today. Not only were my days filled with the joys and tribulations of my life, but theirs as well. Watching them sleep, eat, question who they are; I was a presence in their lives.
My aunt, uncle and their three kids eventually moved out. Granted they moved into a house not even 10 minutes away, but it felt like the end of the world.
Today, I’m the one who left them behind, while I live on my own in my own house, figuring myself out. And now, as Taylor sings in her six-minute fix of nostalgia, I watch their lives in pictures in between the moments where I can be a presence in them again.
