Incredibly close yet miles apart

A short story about sisterhood and the time i went to Johnston Canyon

It’s dark outside tonight. You don’t get darkness like this in London. Roz is walking next to you and it’s actually so dark you have head torches on (with red lights so you don’t destroy your night vision) and your snow boots are crunching rhythmically. One, Two, One, Two. 

Did you know that wild cats will walk inside their own footprints, but dogs won’t? That’s how you can tell the difference between wolf tracks and cougar tracks.

You are deep inside the belly of Johnston Canyon. You pause for a second to trace the walls with your hands. It’s hard to believe it but this was all once underwater, and you can find fossils in the rocks to prove it. “We’ve been here for millennia”, they say. You’ve only been here for 2 weeks.

Roz has been here longer, flying out on a 3-year visa just over 1 year ago. You can’t believe how long it's been since you’ve seen her – this person whose footsteps and breathing patterns and hand gestures you know so well. Not for the first time since you arrived in Banff, you want to cry. You take a selfie with Roz to remember this moment and continue warily on your path. One hand on the wall, eyes scanning for ice sheets.

You chat easily, or not at all, or in a series of anecdotes and jokes that would be indecipherable to anyone outside the two of you. A passer by stops and stares into the sky:

“That’s the big dipper”  

Your eyes follow their finger which is pointing up.  

“It’s not” says their wife. “It’s the little dipper”. 

They begin arguing between themselves. They all just look like stars to you. “Straight people,” Roz says rolling her eyes. She has had little tolerance for heteronormity since she came out. It had caused a bit of a rift between you, last year, as you tried to cover up your hurt feelings every time she jokingly referred to you as a ‘breeder’. Is it true even if you don’t have kids? 

There’s a frozen waterfall up ahead so you both keep trudging through the dark even though the cold has made your fingers hurt in a way you’re not sure you’ve experienced before. A dull ache. You panic you might get frostbite but know better than to bore Roz with your neurosis. 

“Was Barcelona the last time we went away together?” You ask, thinking of that Summer. “Yeah!” says Roz “When you hated me”. She reminds you of how you wouldn’t look in her direction as she danced because she was off-beat and it was ruining your trip. 

“Remember we fell asleep on the beach and you woke up because I was rubbing suncream into your face?” You both laugh and you think of your frozen hands. Can’t imagine them or any other body part ever needing suncream again. 

One of your clearest childhood memories is of being on a beach - probably in France somewhere - and you’re running back and forth between the sea and the camcorder Dad is holding. You remember it from the 3rd person because what you actually remember is the video of it, but it exists and so it must be true.

In the video Roz is chasing after you, never quite reaching the sea or Dad before you’ve turned and are running in the opposite direction. Roz was excruciatingly cute as a child, so this memory always tugs at your heartstrings. Her chubby toddler legs and feet plopping against the wet sand. Always 3 paces behind, never quite catching up.

But she has caught you up now. Taken over from you, in many respects. There are so many things she has done that you can’t relate to. You want to ask her how she did them, but it doesn’t feel right, the roles being reversed. What’s it like being gay? How did you move 4,000 miles across the world? Do you ever miss me? 

You’re at the frozen waterfall now and there’s a little cave that you can shout into and it echoes back. You practise howling into it until you notice that a small queue has formed for the cave. 

“Let’s get a picture. Quick!”

 It’s blurry but it’s enough. Proof that you were here, at the bottom of this Canyon with its fossilised walls. 

“You always joked you had carved a message for me into the walls of mum’s womb” Roz says, tracing the fossils, hand on the other side now as you’re heading back out. 

“I did!” You agree. “And I had it reupholstered. Did you read what it said?”

You like this game because it implies that it was written in the stars, or seared into the cosmos, that she would always come after you. Your best friend. Your worst enemy. Your greatest ally. Your biggest betrayer. 

So much of sisterhood is built on the knowledge that you can dig at the foundations, hammer at the walls and tug at the roof of each other safe in the knowledge that neither of you is going anywhere. What a gift. To be able to be your worst self, explore your darkest crevices and most outrageous impulses one moment, then sit on a sofa together watching The Simpsons the next. 

You’re back out of the canyon now, eating the maple leaf biscuits you can buy everywhere in Banff, even though there are no maple trees here. Roz points out a stretch of highway “I saw a bear there last Summer, when I was riding my bike”. 

You swallow back another neurotic urge to implore her to be safe (Stay away from the mountains! Stay away from the bears! Or better yet, move home!) and nod instead. “Cool!”. The biscuits taste nice and it’s fun to drink hot chocolate from a thermos. Funnier still that Roz owns one.  You’d never need a thermos back home.