My Komrads

By Ella Wilkinson '20

“Wow. Christmas break is over.” I said to myself as I watched both of my older brothers head back to college, not to come back until May. Finally, the house was boy free, free for my two younger sisters and I to do what we wanted. Then a certain little virus hit. It was like my brothers had never left, and with all the online classes, things got hectic. With a family of seven, it is hard to find a place in the house that is completely silent and completely my own. We have had to exile family members to the shed several times. My frustration culminated one day when I was on Zoom with the theology class(also known as group therapy) and I was making a sandwich. I got the panini maker out, warmed it up, got out the bread, spread the mayo, sliced up the cheese, and upon searching for the turkey in the fridge, I see my brother Rand walking to the living room with a plate carrying 6 slices of cinnamon bread topped with hunks of turkey. He had taken it all. I felt so angry, I put the theology class on mute, and politely told him how I felt about him eating my food. But it wasn’t my food, it was our food. My house had completely become a communist country. No longer was there the individual, we were all Komrads. To make the day worse, I found out that the college that I was totally planning on going to, you may know it-Harvard- emailed me telling me that they would not accept me. I felt shocked, surprised, and every other word under the thesaurus entry for astonished. How would my komrads accept me, a failure, now? Well they did because I’m still here and not typing this in the shed. We ended the day by playing Triopoly, which is like monopoly but with three levels, which also ended the communist feelings. So perhaps having a lot of siblings home isn’t so bad.