We don’t wait very long after knocking until Tanner opens the door. I know that I saw him at Christmas but considering how often I see my sisters, it feels like forever since I’ve seen him. I give him a tight hug.
I step forward to hug Emily, quite the feat considering her adorable little pregnant belly. I hear Tanner introduce himself to Grace behind me. He’s the last sibling for her to meet, now she’s met my whole family.
We settled down to chat and man I’ve missed Tanner. He has crazy strong opinions about pretty much everything and he isn’t afraid to share them. We’ve just finished discussing essential oils and how “they can’t just replace modern medicine!!!” when I ask if I can get a drink of water.
They direct me to the cup cabinet and I select a cup—or rather, a jar. It makes me smile that Tanner has adopted our family tradition of using canning jars as cups. I guess we dropped cups too often as kids, so this was Mom’s solution. We all love it now, even when we don’t drop cups anymore.
I turn around and stop short when I see the fridge. I blink.
“Oh yeah, you recognize that, huh?” Tanner says.
I do. I would know this fridge anywhere; it’s the fridge I grew up with. We got this fridge when I was six or seven and my parents still had it when I moved out.
“Did Mom and Dad give it to you?”
“Yeah, when they moved to Chicago. They didn’t want to move it and we needed a fridge so..”
I place my cup onto the water spout guy and start to fill it up, noticing the water residue lines that we could never get rid of. Pushing the cubed ice button is no help—that function broke years ago. Little crushed ice pieces are deposited into my cup. I sigh.
Once back at the table, it surprises me again when I taste the water. I know it’s stupid and it shouldn’t surprise me but man. I know this taste. It’s indescribable, but also not. It tastes like swim meets and sick days and AP tests and family dinners. It tastes like home.
Shaking the thought, I rejoin the conversation and we stay up until almost one in the morning just talking.
So it’s a very early morning the next day. But an early morning I can do. Because DISNEYLAND.
Grace and I are on our way by 8:32, only a few minutes off the time we wanted to leave. We buzz with excitement, singing along at the top of our lungs to Tangled songs and laughing. We’ve been planning this trip for months and it’s finally happening and just gah, it’s perfect. Our first adult road trip and it’s to Disneyland. Yup. Perfection.
For this first several hours, I’m so caught up in the wonder of it all. I don’t start to remember until we get to Buzz Lightyear’s ride. The last time I was here.
It was my senior trip and I didn’t have any friends left, especially since Sam decided not to go on the Disneyland trip. So I’d tagged along with Carlos’s group and they’d been so welcoming. Carlos had obliterated me in the Buzz Lightyear ride, and I’d shoved him, laughing, and he’d grinned and taken my hand.
Carlos is gay. He was also one of my best friends at the time, so it wasn’t weird.
When I obliterate Grace’s score, I remember and look down and my hands feel empty.
We’re waiting in the longest line we’ve had to wait in yet—a whopping thirty minutes. We chose a good time to come to Disneyland. Also we’re waiting for Space Mountain, so the wait time is worth it.
I glance across to Grace’s face. She meets my eyes and presses her lips together as we listen to the conversation going on behind us. That’s what we’ve been doing all day, eavesdropping, people watching. It’s the best. We’ve had an ongoing competition to find the most annoying couple, the most scantily clad person, the most interesting person, and of course any Mormons.
She turns away as the line moves forward. Her hair falls over her shoulder and she pushes it back as I know she will, tucking most of it behind her ear and then pulling out a few strands to fall in front of her ear. It’s funny how well we know each other.
And then it kinda hits me. Why the fridge water and the Carlos memory tugged at my heart so much. It hasn’t just been those though. It’s also being in California. The palm trees everywhere, the general landscape and look of the houses and feel in the air.
Familiarity.
I suppose Mom and Dad moving away from Salinas started it. I have no great love for Salinas, but it’s familiar. Visiting them in Chicago is just weird because it’s not home. I mean, it’s home, because it’s where my parents are. But Chicago is not home. It’s not where I grew up, it’s not familiar. But Salinas isn’t home either. It’s familiarity doesn’t make up for how horrifically it treated me. I suppose Provo is the closest thing I have to a home right now. It’s the most familiar thing I have that is familiar in a good way.
Still, I have such an aching for familiarity. So much so that I was willing to room with Grace again, just to have a familiar face and relationship. I’m realizing now that as much as I love Grace, we don’t always get along the best. Not that every friendship has to be happy all the time.. But she isn’t supportive of the things that I love. She goes as far as to put those things down. We talked about how much we hated it when Tiffany did it. But Grace does it too.
And that’s why I was willing to accept her apology for kinda ripping apart our relationship when she told me she didn’t want to room with me anymore because I wasn’t “social enough” for her. That hurt like nothing else, but when she apologized, I just wanted that relationship back. For the familiarity.
Thinking back further, that must’ve been the reason I kept going back to Ian. He was must first love, sure, but that made him so familiar to me.. it was comforting. It was something I knew. It was something I had to overcome.
I’ll have to overcome it with Grace too. I can’t be her best friend just because she’s familiar. I’m not saying I’m gonna ditch her or anything, that would be stupid. But living away from each other will create some healthy distance I think.
And then my attention turns to familiarity and you.
Whenever I leave after hanging out with my sisters for a while, I always get this pit in my stomach. I don’t want to leave, I don’t want to go back to whatever crap is going on in my life at the moment. It’s taken me a while to figure it out, but I think it’s the familiarity of them. They know me and I know them and there are so many references that I don’t have to explain and I’m pretty much never anxious around them and just.. familiarity is a nice thing.
I want that with you. I think one of the telltale signs I’ve found you is that feeling whenever I leave your company.
I need to be careful to not let my need for familiarity cloud my judgement, like it did with Ian, like it has with Grace.
But I can’t wait.. to have inside jokes with you. I can’t wait to learn how you kiss. I can’t wait to talk together about the stupidest and most insignificant things from our days. I can’t wait to know you and for you to know me.
But I can’t wait to be familiar with you.
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