Last Friday, I took the leg-numbing journey from New York City to San Francisco to attend a close family friend’s wedding. I’d been eagerly awaiting this trip in large part because I’d be spending the week with my beloved older sister, Connie. As an ardent follower of this blog, you’ve undoubtedly heard me wax poetic about my sister. Truly, if I were to create one of those most-frequently-spoken word clouds, CONNIE would tower over the rest.
Actually, earlier this summer, when Connie made the equally leg-numbing trek from San Francisco to New York for a visit, she stopped by my workplace and encountered an almost comical fanfare: “THE Connie Wu! We’ve been hearing about you for months!” Given the proximity to our last reunion, my excitement was disproportionate to my remaining life updates. But that’s the beauty of our relationship. No matter how many monthly four-hour phone calls we have, how many successive visits, we always, always have more to urgently bestow upon each other.
I’ve never met anyone like Connie. Connie moves like an anime character. She whips her arms forward in passionate gesticulation. When she listens to you, her eyebrows rise further than you’d think humanly possible, and suddenly, you’re the most interesting person in the world. On my birthday every year, she crafts a scavenger hunt with at least a dozen clues relating to that year’s Annie-isms. I’m pretty sure she’s watched one thousand movies. But she doesn’t just watch them. She knows the directors, and why they tell stories the way they do, and probably exactly what techniques they are using. Somehow, she still never makes you feel like your Letterboxd is subpar. Sometimes I’ll say something off-the-cuff like “what if I started my own craft business” (à la, “would you still love me if I were a worm?”). I’m not even done with the reverie when her forehead furrows, head whips forward, and she asks, “why not???” Talking to her is seeing myself, but bigger. Better.
On this particular Bay-bound flight, I was thinking about how a soul sister could have landed into the body of a real sister, and how on earth I could possibly have a lifetime of things to talk to her about. To pass the time, I downloaded Swann’s Way onto my Kindle. (Yes, Connie made fun of me by saying, “Of course you’re reading Proust on vacation.”) In my defense, I’ve never finished the full source material of the madeleine scene from this blog’s eponymous novel, and I figured it was time.
In returning to this text, I was reminded that the moment the cookie touches lips is actually quite brief. More real estate is spent on the protagonist’s fixation with recreating this intoxicating alignment with his past. After the memory sparks, he muses:
“I put down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind finds that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.”
Proust points out the challenge of seeking new illuminations in our own source material. When we experience seismic shifts, how can we retrace the path of lighting to the source of their ignition?
Prior to the weekend’s wedding, Connie told me she was feeling a bit nervous to socialize, and as the resident chatty Cathy, I promised I’d glom to her hip. At the reception, a trio of the groom’s old coworkers approached with the typical inane wedding banter. I don’t remember exactly what one of them said, but it unleashed in Connie and me uproarious laughter. As we threw our heads back and scrunched our faces, I found myself laughing even harder. Seeing her face, the exact vision of mine, and hearing the identical reverberations of our joy infect our table-mates, was like biting into a madeleine. It was a sudden illumination of the same grooves whittled into our vocal cords over many years.
Growing up, I thought of Connie and I in the classic Sister Foils. Connie was the grounded, rational science girl. I was the emotional, obsessive artsy one. I had my mom’s eyes, while she had my dad’s. While I preferred to chat off someone’s ear, she found most comfort in listening. Just like the nondescript gray that suddenly reads black when placed next to a stark white, each of our proclaimed lanes defined the other. Perhaps we didn’t consciously enforce these dynamics, but it was easier to walk on parallel tracks in opposite directions. Tracing the lightning bolt back in that moment of mutual laughter, I notice that, at some point, our tracks merged. Like those cupped playground telephones, we were transmitting the same vibrations. How did we get here?
Connie tells me that this year she’s been conjuring her inner Annie in new social territory by asking, “What Would Annie Do?”. This delights me to no end because I picture a tiny Annie avatar whispering in her ear to ask the barista where she got her earrings, or to get the phone number of that friendly movie-goer. I love that across an entire country, I am guiding her – that a little Annie lives in Connie.
For me, I’ve never not carried Connie with me. When I feel the tangles of my thoughts begin to overflow, I call Connie. I lie down, and I talk and talk and talk, and then listen with bated breath until I feel that somehow, we have in “seeking”, begun “creating.” This is blessing number one of having an older sister. It’s someone who will literally do anything to protect you and champion you. Even if it means waiting for you to come to a realization she’s known all along. Even though she is the one who has walked through the muck so that you may place your slightly smaller feet into her comfortable casts.
The week after the wedding, I found myself with ideal hands during Connie’s workday. I randomly decided to attempt whittling and bought a set of wood blocks to shape into chopsticks. I was ill-equipped, so Connie lent me her gardening gloves as makeshift cut guards. And whittling knife in gloved hand, I pared and pared. Slowly, chopsticks began presenting themselves. Within the piece of wood – beyond the negative space and now-unnecessary shards – was the essence of what I was seeking. The act of looking for that final shape was intertwined with the act of creating.
I think my laughter-induced madeleine moment was realizing that being sisters with Connie isn’t about the gap between difference and similarity. It’s knowing deep in my gut there is someone out there with the skill to extract my precious, concentrated me-ness. Someone who sees the potential of my essence so clearly that it’s not even mine anymore. It’s hers, bestowed upon me by her – or maybe it’s bestowed upon her by me – donned like borrowed gloves, used for protection, and then traded back when either one of us needs a little extra strength.
At the airport before my leg-numbing journey back to New York City, I stumble upon a gate exhibit by the San Francisco Opera. I learn that the equivalent of theater’s “break a leg” in opera is the Italian phrase, “into the mouth of the wolf,” to which a performer responds, “may the wolf die.” What an image – standing in the wings of the stage, heart pounding, and just prying open the jaws of the beast. Confidently stepping in.
Connie and I, we are both on the brink of our own plunges. Into something new, or maybe just deeper into ourselves. I, for one, am afraid. But I know that I have vials of people like Connie. People whose borrowed strength will force me to see this avatar of myself I’m not yet brave enough to champion. What I really need is for the monster of my fears to disintegrate into the whole of myself. To turn the beast inside out.
After all, Proust’s “abyss of uncertainty” is not actually the walls of our minds. It is the invigorating possibility of prying open the borders of what was. It's the shadow of infinite utensils inside a block of wood. It’s the roaring applause heard from the belly of the beast.
Connie, I love you.
May our wolves die.