Usually, at some point during the day, it becomes clear what I’m going to blog about. It’s like an idea shows up, and part of me just knows—that’s it. Well, it’s two hours to midnight, Cinderella, and so far that idea hasn’t shown up. That being said, it’s National Siblings Day, so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my one and only sibling, Dee-Anne. (That’s her in the photo above. She’s the pretty one. With long hair.)

As I write this now, I’m in the room that was hers when we were children. All of her furniture is gone, the walls have been repainted, and there aren’t many signs of her left, save a bookend of a teddy bear. The bear has its legs spread far apart, heels to Jesus, so I don’t know what that’s about. In the closet, there’s her Teddy Ruxpin, as well as a dry-erase notepad with two more teddy bears on it. Both of them are wearing leotards. (It was the 80s.)

Obviously, Dee-Anne had a thing for teddy bears.

It’s weird being back here, living in the house I grew up in, staying in her room. Even without closing my eyes, I can see where her canopy bed used to sit. I remember getting a spanking in here once, by her nightstand. I remember where in the room she and her friends used to play with Barbie dolls and I wasn’t allowed.

Memories for me are almost always related to space. Like, when I think about things that happened at my dance studio, I always remember the thing and exactly where I was standing when it happened. It’s like that with everything. I remember the spot in my grandparents’ front yard where I was standing when I saw the smoke from our house burning a few blocks away. Just that one memory of the smoke and the spot in the yard is all I’ve got. Nothing else comes back, other than I know that my sister was there beside me.

Sometimes I walk through the house, and it’s like a dream. In reality, Mom and Dad are in the living room watching Days of Our Lives, but I see my sister and me there the night that Dad was arrested over twenty years ago. We watched it on television together.

There’s a wall in the living room with pictures of us, most of them taken about twelve years ago, when I opened my dance studio. Dee-Anne was my first dance partner, and we took a lot of pictures for publicity. But there are also a lot of pictures from when we were kids, as well as one when I was a senior in high school that’s airbrushed more than the cover of Cosmopolitan.

As I think about it now, I realize that my sister was my first friend, one of the first people I met when I came into this world. And I guess we did all the normal things that siblings do—double bounce each other on the trampoline, go to each other’s ballgames and ballet recitals, fight with each other in the backseat of the car. But there were certainly all the not-so-normal things that happened, like the time we walked the streets of El Paso as teenagers, searching for a Western Union, because Mom’s purse was stolen and we needed cash if we were going to be able to visit Dad in prison. (I really should have started therapy sooner.)

After my first nephew was born, I came out to my sister. I think I had just broken up with my first official boyfriend, and I was such a fucking mess that my parents had asked what was going on. So I told them, then decided Dee-Anne should know too.

So we’re driving to the grocery store, and my nephew is in a car seat in the back, and I just blurt it out. “So this probably won’t come as a surprise, but I’m gay—now you say something supportive.”

And then my sister stuck her hand in the air (like a Pentecostal on a Sunday morning) and said, “High five for finally saying something.”

Later that year, for my birthday, she sent me a card that said, “I’m sorry for not letting you play with my Barbie dolls.”

I always tell people that I’ve been really fortunate in terms of my sexuality. My family is over-the-top accepting. Just today, my mom made a point to tell me how handsome she thinks Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper are. More than little things like that, I know that I can be myself. I know anyone I choose to date or spend time with is welcome here. But that’s not always the case, of course. I know gay guys who have been kicked out by their mothers, thrown up against the wall by their fathers, told they can’t see their nephews by their sisters.

And all I can say is that I’m grateful. There’s something special and humbling about being able to be fully yourself around your family, the people who have known you the longest, that have been through hell with you. It’s so easy to put expectations on people you’ve known forever, to insist that they don’t change or even grow up. But I think if you really love someone, you love them no matter what. And it doesn’t matter if they get sick, or go to prison, or come out of the closet because sure, people change, but love doesn’t. That’s the thing that stays the same.

And if someone changes and you stop loving them—well, that’s not love.

So if I’ve never said it before, Dee-Anne, thank you for loving me. Thank you for being my first friend, for standing beside me during the very worst moments of this life, and thank you for dancing with me, and for that high five and the retroactive invitation to play with your Barbie dolls. I definitely would have taken you up on that. But then again, had I come out sooner, I also would have stopped you from wearing those jeans in the eighth grade.