Ten Years Apart

Untitled | Ananya Roy | Photography

Ten Years Apart by Eliza Murphy

My mom jokes that we are twins ten years apart. She says it was as if we were born in the same moment, nearly identical, but I was frozen in time for a decade. When told we look and act the same, we will look right at each other, with the same quick head turn, and proceed to make identical questioning faces as we sarcastically mouth “Us? Similar? No.” But me and my sister are entirely different. At first glance our eyes are both blue, but hers has more gray and mine has more green. Our personalities are far from the same, hence the one letter difference in our Myers Briggs personality type. And we may have the same favorite Taylor Swift Album, but our top ten songs are vastly different. So no, we are not the same. I could count this 10 year distance that stretched between us on the numberline in my 2nd grade classroom, counting the tick marks from the white board to the clock. 

My sister taught me what I could not yet see. 

When I was 7, and my sister was 17, I made it nearly impossible for her to get her homework done. She was in high school, and I was in elementary, so as you can imagine our school workloads were very different. She was gifted with important tasks which she wrote in purple pens and crossed off in her planner. She annotated texts with big, confusing words, and her math rarely had numbers. Her high school homework was a glimpse into a world I wished so desperately to know. Every day, like clockwork, I would nag and nag and nag at her, asking what she was doing and when oh when she would be done with homework and ready to play in the dollhouse with me. Which, obviously, was her favorite way to spend the little free time she had. 

One day when I got home, an unexpected gift from my sister was lying on my bed in the room we shared. A small spiral notebook, with dotted paper, white and clean, with a crafted cover page that read “Eliza’s Math Notebook.” Not long after, the pages of this notebook would be smothered with my new favorite thing. 

Every night from then on, my sister would write a series of math problems on a page in a colorful pen, one night orange, the next pink. She would effortlessly write the equations with the utmost precision, carefully placing each line and curve within the dotted grid of the paper. The moment she finished writing, I would grab the notebook from her hands and hunch over it in a frenzy, using a crayon to scribble out answers. I would finish as soon as I possibly could, rushing it back into my sister’s hands to be traded with a fresh set of problems. As the routine became more and more of a rapid fire, she upped the difficulty of the problems, in an attempt to score more than 2 minutes of uninterrupted study time. 

I was a stubborn kid, and I remember saying “you can’t subtract 5 from 3.”

She lifted her head from her studying, responding “It’s -2.” 

I thought of the number line in my classroom. In the corner, where the numbers started, was 0. There were no numbers that came before 0. I could add and multiply up and up and up and up, an arrow at the end of the number line telling me that I could keep going. But I hit a wall at the opposite corner of the classroom. My sister showed me a new number line, one with a center and two arrows sticking out on either side. An ant on her pen line could go either way up and down an infinite rope. 

My mind was spinning with the idea that my classroom number line, the one I had stared at for hours, had lied to me. I imagined point zero on the number line, placed carefully in the corner, a row of positive numbers growing on one side. Now a new line sprouted in the opposite direction, bursting through the cinder block walls, barreling through city block after city block. After that, there was no going back. I would fill every silence in any room I was in with a constant drum of negative number talk. Much to my teachers’ dismay, I would correct their lessons, saying “Well actually 0 is not the smallest number.” And then after school, while my mom was making dinner, instead of washing the tomatoes and cutting the potatoes as she had asked, I would sit on the counter, swinging my legs back and forth, contemplating a number line that goes in two directions. And after all this talk, I would return to the notebook, eager to spill the numbers out from my brain and onto the paper. With every neatly written equation from my sister's hands came a crayon scribble from mine, followed by neat X’s over wrong answers and another couple crayon attempts till I got it right. 

After the epiphany of negative numbers came a constant droning thought of infinity, and the knowledge that it could move in any direction I pleased. Something that could get bigger and bigger and never stop. 

I’m not sure when between then and now came the phrase “infinity to the infinieous power,” a magnificent addition to my elementary school vocabulary. Seeing now the red squiggly line under “infinieous,” I’m realizing my tokened phrase was even less grounded in reality than I had previously thought. But that’s beside the point.

Infinity to the infinieous power was not handed out lightly, to topics such as the growing universe or the amount of questions I asked in a day. This phrase was reserved for a true biggest quantity. 

When I moved finitely south from my sister, and she moved finitely north from me, a new tradition was begun. Letters. To be fair, if I recall, the letters I sent her were not nearly as detailed and, honestly, coherent at all, compared to hers, thus it was largely one-sided. But I can not explain in words the rush to grab a letter from her the moment it slid under the door, rapidly tearing through the envelope and scanning every line. These letters, her words, my eyes, bridged the finite gap between her college town and my new neighborhood. 

Infinity to the infinieous power became the scalar quantity which could explain all that could not be said through words of future plans and how-was-your-days. Infinity to the infinieous power was how with a 50 word vocabulary I could tell my sister all that I felt. 

And so every letter, back and forth, signed, “I love you infinity to the infinieous power.”

To this day, my sister continues to amaze me with her dazzling persistence and ability to open my eyes to worlds I never knew existed. Her one fine line pen and my one big orange crayon, along with one spiral notebook, handed my stubborn 7-year-old self an imagination that could take her anywhere. My sister has now been teaching second grade for 5 years, which is wild. She is, unsurprisingly, incredible at her job. Now using many more spiral notebooks and a few more pens she is able to give what she gave me to many more groups of students. 

I keep the math notebook in the bottom drawer of my desk, yet it never collects dust. Looking back on it, it’s really a series of elementary school math problems, number lines, and illustrations of counting strategies. But I distinctly remember how big that small book felt when I was younger. Maybe it’s just because my hands were smaller back then. 

If my sister had not been in the room when I first saw negative numbers, I probably would have required quite a bit of convincing. Based on what I knew, these new numbers were complete gibberish. As much as I would love to think so, my classroom number line was not a liar, it was not cruel and villainous. It was not out to get me. It was simply leaving parts out. These gaps would soon be filled with the most trusted truths that could not be shaken by any force that reckoned with them. And that is all because of one teacher. And as much as I would love to think that I am open minded, I am incredibly stubborn. 

And so from one book, and a bottomless supply of love and laughter, came a lesson that placed infinity within a 15 foot stretch of cinderblock.