Sissy, nooooo

For almost my entire life, my sister and I have shared a room. There is something really special about sharing a room with a family member because its not like college when you have a bad roommate and you say, “This person is a freak,” it’s like when they’re a family-member and you have no choice. Let me just pause and say that I am also a nightmare. When I was little I refused to go to sleep unless I had my Dorothy figurine by my bed. Why? Who knows? How fucking weird is that. And I had to have a cup of “bubble water” by my bed, and it had to be filled up to a certain point, and it had to be in the clown cup, and sometimes in the middle of the night I would yell “fresh” because it would go flat and what is the point of bubble water without the bubbles.

I usually have a tough time falling asleep: the room needs to be perfectly dark and NYC quiet (so sirens and construction is just fine). My sister is the opposite. When we were younger, she had to listen to Harry Potter tapes in order to fall asleep. I would lie in bed eyes fucking open, open, open, and Harry and Hermione would be off on an adventure. Now it wasn’t like the tapes moved from the beginning to end, they were all over the place. Tape 6, side A would play and like Ron and Harry would be drinking butterbeer and then BAM the tape would finish and the machine would switch to the other cassette which was OBVIOUSLY not tape 7 but instead tape 4 side B of The Prisoner of Azkaban and no longer The Chamber of Secrets. Sometimes, when the machine started to make the sound that indicated it was getting ready to switch to the second cassette (obviously this machine was not fucking around), I would get out of bed and turn it off. My sister would then magically wake up and say, “Sissy nooooo” and fucking Hogwarts would be back on.

So there aren’t tapes anymore but now, instead, she has a fan on because the sound is critical to falling asleep. I have sort of gotten used to this except that, compounded with the fact that my house is “cross-breezed” like an open-air market, I’m like really cold. Whenever my mother goes somewhere she insists there is “really no air in here” so she opens the window “just a crack.” Ok, let me tell you something, when it’s like 10 degrees outside and the window is opened a crack in her room, and in the living room, and in the bathroom, there is enough air. I promise. And you know what? If there isn’t enough air, luckily I have this fan by the foot of bed that just might do the trick.