There are twenty four hours, one thousand one hundred and fourty minutes, and eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds in one whole day. Some days it feels as though time is dragging on and lasting an eternity, other days it passes by faster than the speed of light. Sometimes I wish the day would hurry and come to an end, while other times I pray time would stand still.
I found that the days that go on and on and I wish would end, are the days which I am stuck in school and not in the mood to deal with anything. The days that I want to last forever yet go by too quickly, are the days when my sister comes home to visit.
A surprise visit at ten o'clock at night, to kindly grace us with her presence, was what Ashley gave my parents and I this weekend. I can't decide what I enjoyed the most about it, actually getting to spend time with her, or the look on my dad's face when he saw her walk in.
Growing up it was always my parents, Ashley, and I; we were constantly together. When she left for college our little family of four at home dropped down to an even more minuscule number of three. Nothing was the same. It felt as though a piece of the puzzle was missing. I came to the realization that from then on out things were never going to be the same. Pretty soon I will be off to college, we will both be going on with our lives, and our childhood will fade further into the past.
This is why I absolutely love when she comes home to visit, because when she is home...our family becomes whole again.
This weekend she was home for less than twenty four hours, but in those few hours that she was here it allowed us to dip back into the past; to pretend that things were like they used to be and that our family was the same as it has always been.
It's sad to think that as we grow older and sink into the real world, trips home will be less frequent. That is why when Ashley is home, even if it's only for a little while, I like to take it all in and enjoy the time that we are all spending together.
Less than twenty four hours was all I was given, but it was all that I needed.
