Once upon a time, there was a magical world where the mud from my mother’s freshly watered roses was coffee and the sticks that fell from the branches of our backyard trees were witches’ wands. This was the fairytale that my little sister and I wrote together. We were princesses, pop singers, actresses, fairies, or anything we wanted to be from the stories we read and the movies we watched. Every morning of summer break, our parents would leave for work and a magic door would swing open inviting us into this secret world of adventure and mystery. We gave each other new names, new personalities, new histories. We were different characters in our own stories. And at the end of the day when we heard the sound of the garage door opening and knew our mom or dad was home from work, we would climb back into reality and close the door until the next day. Sometimes we would leave it ajar, and our story would sneak back with us to the other side. We started creating signals to check if we were still playing without our parents knowing. A scratch on the nose in the middle of dinner. Are we still playing? A tug on the ear. Yes. We didn’t need a signal for no because it was always yes. Our parents never knew that in those moments we were not their daughters, but two woodland fairies enjoying a midsummer picnic or famous actresses at a five-star restaurant.

One night we were watching TV and our dad walked up to us holding a bible. “I want you girls to start practicing public speaking. You’re going to take turns reading passages from the bible out loud to us.” It sounded silly, but I turned off the TV. I’m the oldest so I had to go first. I stood up to read a passage and couldn’t get past the fifth word without giggling. “This isn’t a game! Try again.” I got through all the words this time, but my dad said I mumbled. I sat back down. My sister stood up and asked if she could read from her Harry Potter book instead of the Bible. She said it with a slight eyeroll. She was always bolder, braver than me. It was fine with him. The main point, he said, was that we get comfortable speaking in a confident voice. So she cleared her throat importantly, and then began to read a chapter from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone like she was J.K. Rowling herself, at a book reading, with a British accent and all. Dad was getting frustrated. “This isn’t a game!” he snapped. But we made eye contact and I smiled because I knew, and she knew; the magic door had opened. From then on, Harry Potter became our shared story. Every day of the rest of summer, we left the muggle world behind. The sound of our parents’ cars leaving for work was the sound of the brick wall in the back of the Leaky Cauldron opening onto Diagon Alley.

At the end of summer break, we went on a family vacation to the beach. For my sister and I, it meant a new setting for a new story waiting to be told. The first day there, we turned into fish swimming in the ocean to overcome our fear of the powerful waves. “If we are FISH,” she grabbed my hand, “we can’t DROWN!!!” And she ducked beneath the water’s surface. I took a deep breath and sunk below the water too, just as the wave rolled over our heads. To my amazement, the roaring water was silenced. It was calm and quiet. This side of the wave was bubbly and soft and I stopped being afraid. In that moment I knew—the magic of our story was real.

As we got older, we grew too tall to fit through the magic door. We let the vines overgrow around it and instead spent our summer breaks on the couch rewatching the HP movies and criticizing every aspect of the story we loved so much. I guess years of living in the wizarding world gave us our sense of credibility. “How did Dumbledore not know that Mad Eye Moody was an imposter if he’s the most powerful wizard in the world?” We would rally off seven other questions like this one. At other times, we would critique the directorial choices or the movie’s script like we were world-renowned film critics. It was a different kind of magic, but it was magic, nonetheless.

The day I left for college was bittersweet. My sister was starting her second year of high school and I was moving out. It felt like our magic stories had come to an end. But as I was sitting in my dorm room, listening to her tell me about her day at school, I realized it was not the last page, but a new chapter. We had never talked to each other like this before, like best friends in the early 2000s calling each other after school, fingers twirling around the curly phone cord. From that point on, our daily text messages, Snapchats, calls, and emails became the literature of my life. We perfected the art of turning our day-to-day lives into stories. Whenever there was drama in my life, or just something happening out of the ordinary, I couldn’t wait to tell my sister. I would leave out certain details until the moment it would make the biggest impact; when several things were happening at once, I could carefully arrange them in an order that kept the story flowing seamlessly; and I could paint the perfect picture for her of everyone involved, even down to the way they talked. And she would do the same for me, turning people I already knew into characters in her story. One day, she secretly got a tattoo and texted me, “Don’t tell Parents but…” After that day, we only ever referred to them as one singular proper being.

When I was little, I wanted to stay in our magic world forever and never grow up. But I realize now that the magic was always there no matter how old we were, or whether we were playing make-believe or not. Those stories were a part of our reality. It was the magic of the world we created together. It was the way we would say, “accio remote” to mean, “can you please hand me the remote.” Or the way we would hold hands at night during a thunderstorm and give a squeeze to say, “Are you still awake?” and a squeeze back to answer, “Yes, don’t be scared.” It was speaking in code and speaking without saying anything at all. It was this magical world hidden in plain view that only we had the key to, and all of our inside jokes and unspoken ways of communicating was its native language. It was my first language, and she was the only one who could understand me. 

In March of 2015, my little sister passed away on a dark and rainy Wednesday. I stayed up the whole night reading our Facebook messages on my phone under the covers. She was so funny. I laughed through my tears and then got so angry I deleted them all in one heartbreaking moment. Three months later, I graduated college with a degree in English and came home to a quiet house that was now too big and too empty. It was summer break and for the first time in nineteen years, I was alone. I went to her room and sat on the floor against the wall pretending I was small again, her furniture around me my fortress. Leaning on her purple chair, I found under the seat cushion a small, glittery journal. I opened it and saw that it was filled with pages and pages of poems and personal essays. All those years, we had shared a love for writing and had somehow never talked about it. I felt like Harry finding Sirius’s two-way mirror at the end of the book and wishing he could have just one more conversation with him.

 It's hard to believe that was seven years ago. The world is so different now, but in a way, it has stopped turning for me. Everywhere I go in this small town, the echoes of our stories linger like the barely visible writing on my handmade Valentine’s Day card that she stapled to her wall in 2010. Having to be the sole keeper of our inside jokes is such a specific type of pain I never knew I could feel. And when I’m standing at the edge of the ocean, the feeling of the water gently coming up to meet me is no longer comforting, it hurts. So here I am, in this empty new apartment in Seattle. The waters up here don’t know her. The walls of this room have never heard her laugh. And I put pen to paper in a blank journal as I try to create something new, but its pages are lined in purple because I am only here and able to write these stories, because I learned how to write them with her.

-Hannah Banez

Hannah works in marketing as a Creative Copywriter and is currently an English MA student at Long Beach State University. She is interested in nostalgia, memory, and music in literature. Hannah lives in Seattle with her husband.