Blue Sisters

by Coco Mellors

A sister is not a friend. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend?

True sisterhood, the kind where you grew fingernails in the same womb, were pushed screaming through identical birth canals, is not the same as friendship. You don’t choose each other, and there’s no furtive period of getting to know the other. You’re part of each other, right from the start.

He was the only man in the house, but he also was the house. They lived inside his moods.

Her life had been reduced to two days, the day Nicky was still alive and the day she died. The rich and subtle patchwork of years and seasons that made up her life before was gone.

It was easy to love someone in the beginnings and endings; it was all the time in between that was so hard.

Until you know my sisters, she used to say to Pavel, you don’t know me.

At least with her mother, she was allowed to remember that she had once been a child. Around her sisters, she was always the eldest, which meant, in comparison to them, she was never young.

It’s like this invisible limb no one knows I have, but it’s always there. It’s part of me.”

“I find what gives me pleasure and I do it until it gives me pain,” she said. “Every time.”

girls, lifted together on a tide of riotous, unapologetic joy, the feeling that to be a girl with other girls was not some weakness, as they had been told, but a power, the best and luckiest power on earth.

you could feel guilty for a certain behavior or action but still fundamentally know you were a good person—but shame was deeper, shame was for who you were.