Every autumn, I find myself admiring nature’s brazen signs of change: leaves cascading from their branches, the hues of orange and red, a crisp breeze in the air. There is evidence of change everywhere, underneath our feet and above our heads, always happening and always on the horizon.
As I settle into my last year here at Brown, I am constantly grappling with the reality that my life will soon change, and has been changing, from the moment I stepped on campus. The last few years of my life have looked different from the rest. The things I’ve grown accustomed to are things that once terrified me: gruesome dining hall food, balancing academics with extracurriculars, surviving rough New England winters, and most substantially, the feeling of missing people. For me, missing someone—a friend, a parent, a sibling—is a lingering emotion, one that will stick around for as long as my brain works (which, I hope, will be a very long time).
Being away from home, perhaps one of the hardest things I’ve had to reconcile with is getting to spend less time with my family, particularly my sisters (one a sophomore and the other a senior in high school) as they live out their formative years. As the years go by, I become increasingly sentimental about the passage of time, and I often think about how there are so many moments of their lives that I miss out on, whether that means volleyball games or emotional epiphanies. These thoughts tend to hit me spontaneously, when I’m washing the dishes or writing a paper. And sometimes, when they do, as if fate has delivered it, I receive a text from one sister or the other. On move-in day this year, as I ruminated on the fact that my adolescence was truly over, my sister texted me:
“Evan played ‘Na Na Na’ in the car, then I get to Emma’s house and ‘Our Song’ is playing, then Treblemakers like WOW.”
This message may sound incoherent to anyone else except our trio, but to the trained eye, it references several important shared interests among us: 1. One Direction (“Na Na Na” being a fairly obscure song in their discography), 2. Taylor Swift, and 3. Pitch Perfect (2012). These sorts of texts can be found embedded throughout our sister group chat (thematically named “Barden Bellas,” after the central a cappella group of Pitch Perfect)—a steady constant throughout my time at Brown, providing me the comfort of home even 200 miles away. When one of us hears a One Direction song in public, encounters a movie reference in the wild, or feels the urge to rewatch Victorious, we alert the others, like sleeper agents. By updating one another on the things we watch or listen to, we can remain relatively in tune with each other’s busy lives. Sending these updates makes me feel understood, and there’s a sense of satisfaction in knowing that the intensity of my interests will be met with equal enthusiasm.
In general, sharing films, shows, music, and books with the people in my life tends to help me feel grounded. Growing up, I have always latched onto characters, themes, and storylines that I resonate or connect with, and to share that with someone is like sharing a piece of my soul. It’s a way to be vulnerable, like putting my mind on display and giving people insight into all of the things that have shaped me. This act of sharing has been the foundation of several of my relationships:I’ve bonded with friends over our fixations on Normal People and New Girl, and even as we all get older and grow apart, that mutual devotion is always something we can deliberate. Young adulthood is volatile, and in the face of constant adjustment, it can be alleviating to discuss the highlights of pop culture instead of five-year plans.
Perhaps the most prominent piece of media in our sister repertoire, if you can’t tell, is Pitch Perfect: a 2012 film about an all-female collegiate a cappella group (the aforementioned Barden Bellas) attempting to regain their reputation as a respected campus organization. Anyone who knows me knows that Pitch Perfect is an integral part of my identity, not only for its influence on my sense of humor, but also for its role in my relationship with my sisters. I recall watching the movie for the first time at ten years old, unaware of how many jokes were going over my head, but somehow knowing that it would eventually become canon in our household. When my sisters were finally old enough to watch it too, the three of us instantly developed an infatuation that thrives to this day. It’s a perfect storm of everything we want in a movie: female empowerment, pop musical numbers (with “synchronized lady dancing,” as they call it), and slow-burn romance.
In the beginning of the movie, the protagonist, Beca, enters college feeling like many students do—lost and searching for community. She joins the Barden Bellas, and at first, they don’t seem to click, blinded by their surface-level incompatibilities and stuck in their habits of solitude. They face disagreements about the direction of their group and whether they should subscribe to the conventional traditions of the past or embrace modernity. By the end of the movie, however, they’ve formed an unbreakable bond, brought together by their love of music and each other. Like me and my sisters, they have their occasional tiffs, but they are secure in their unwavering support for one another. In their final performance, the Bellas finally accept their individualities and come together as a collective, despite their differences. In a nutshell, that is exactly what it means to have sisters, blood-related or not. Who knew that a movie about collegiate a cappella could paint such a beautiful portrait of sisterhood?
Sometimes, it feels like my sisters and I share a brain, no doubt a product of our joint obsessions. At any given time, I could text them a few words in reference to the film (such as: “I have nodes” or “vertical running”), and they would understand perfectly. This collective brain is an encyclopedia of random film, television, and internet quotes and references, and thinking about them often provides me the relief of knowing that no matter where we are, we remain tethered to one another. Our love for Pitch Perfect is woven into the fabric of our sisterhood, bonding us forever beyond the DNA we share. I look at the film and all of our other shared interests as pillars of stability in my life, amidst the chaos and unfamiliarity of growing up. Soon there will be a time when my sisters and I don’t live under the same roof, when the paths of our lives will diverge even further and we become different people. Like the seasons, we will all change, and maybe we can never return to the way things were, but there is always Pitch Perfect to bring us back.
