I know it’s majorly lame of me but, even though i saw her just yesterday, i miss my sister incredible amounts. She is by far the most talented person i know. I am always amazed by her artistic skill and her inventive architecture work. And i’m not the only one, a boy in her class recently dubbed her ‘the next Zaha Hadid’. I also love Zaha Hadid but that can wait for another day. Back to Mona. She is probably the only person in the world that truly gets my sense of humour and my favourite thing about her is that even though she is a total intimacy-phobe, she will still [kinda] cuddle me when i want a cuddle, which is most of the time. Here are some of my favourite Mona memories:
- I was always quite a mean sister and would make Mona my ‘slave’ for the day/week/month/however long i could convince her to be my slave. I would make her do stuff like kiss my feet and clean my room. I wasn’t very nice. Anyway, one time i was extra mean. She had a poster of a Kingfisher in her bedroom [she has always been obsessed with birds]. I somehow managed to convince her that the Kingfisher was a demon and that it was going to torture and kill her. The only way of protecting herself was to wash her hands with the magic lotion [soap] every night before she went to sleep out of our polly in my pocket shell and say the magic words [some voodoo shit i made up]. She did it for a year at least before my mum found out.
- Mona had a major sweet tooth. MAJOR. By which i mean, at the age of 5 she had to go to hospital to have FOUR rotting teeth taken out. You must think i had a really awful mother. You are wrong. In fact, i had a really sneaky sister. Mona would STEAL sweets and chocolate from Woolworths and hide them under her mattress. After she had secretly eaten them, she would hide the wrappers behind her bed. I will never forget the day when my mum moved her bed to do some cleaning and found heaps and heaps and heaps of sweet wrappers. The best thing about Mona’s sweet obsession is that i would always find sweets in the most random places, my favourite being when i found a box of After Eights on the ledge under the dining room table.
- Our dens. We grew up in London. There really wasn’t anywhere outside for us to play, but we made do with what we had. There was the tiniest one square metre patch of bushes outside our house by the car park. One summer we crawled under the bushes only to find a beautiful clear patch, perfect for a den. I remember spending weeks in there building little twig sofas and little twig chairs. They probably realistically looked like piles of twigs but in my head we had built a little twig home. It was my favourite place in the world till they chopped it down and covered it with turf. SAD FACE. We also had a secret den behind the garages which had an imaginary lock and key that only Mona could open. Its still one of my favourite places to go.
- Snail races. You heard. For about 3 summers in a row, me and Mona would get out the chalk and draw a race track on the pavement and spend hours watching our favourite snails racing. I will never forget the day they all started mating. For some insane reason, ALL of the snails started piling up on each other. I think we just presumed that meant they were mating but two of them were actually attached by some kinda of white fleshy thing. Do snails have willies? What a horrible thought. Maybe they were siamese twins? Either way, it was gross.
- Dogs. Mona truly believed she was a dog. I’m not even joking. She wore a dog costume all the time, she always ate food like a dog [literally just pushed her face into the food] and she even cut the back board of her bunkbed/desk combo into the shape of a dog kennel. The best was when she wrote a song about dogs, the lyrics went like this ‘Heaven ain’t what it used to be, candy wheels and an apple tree, chocolate bars and bumble bees, heaven ain’t what it used to be. Doggies tails and doggies wails, doggies bones and doggies tones, doggies bags and doggies drags, doggies everything’
- She used to flash her underwear ALL THE TIME. She had a pair of Aladdin knickers that she loved more than anything in the world and she insisted on showing them to everyone she met. EVERYONE. I rememeber my best friend and her brother coming over for tea, all of us sat around the kitchen table eating fish fingers. Mona suddenly gets up, stands on her chair, pulls down her skirt and points out her knickers to all of us, as we are eating. I think whats funniest is that she is the complete opposite now. She also wrote a rock song called XEX [this is how she thought you spelt sex], it went like this ‘X E X, X E X, WE’RE ALL GONNA HAVE X E X’ To my mothers embarrassment, she would sing it to everyone that came to our house.
Right, i could go on forever and ever but i shouldn’t really indulge in nostalgia and it is most likely that no one but Mona will really appreciate these memories anyway. I FEEL VERY SILLY FOR CARING SO MUCH, I always wish i could be ‘cool’ and not care about people and memories but really i am far too soppy for that.
