I'm glad we're friends now.

A series on sisterhood and long-distance dynamics, revisiting the space where you had to share your childhood years, and exploring and documenting the roots of a friendship many years in the making.

To call it a project is a little misaligned with what this series really is, which is more of a, hopefully, life-long record of sisterhood. It began mostly by accident during the pandemic in 2020.

My entire conscious life has been spent having a sister, I have very few memories where she’s not present. I do remember our first family holiday when I was four, and she wasn’t here yet, and I think I remember my mom being pregnant with her. But I very distinctly remember the day that we drove to the hospital to pick them up once she was born, my uncle driving his van and my aunt and cousin there too, me in the backseat, having no idea what to expect. I was about to turn six years old in just a few days and here I was, on my way to see my little sister for the first time. I remember someone putting her down on that very old bed with the springs once we got back home, and me leaning over to look at her. In the bedroom that was then our parents’ but which would some years later become our shared room, her and I. I remember the baby smell, something that has stuck with me to this day and whenever I’m reminded of it in some way I instantaneously get transported back to that exact moment.

I remember giving my kindergarten classmates chocolates a couple days later as a way of celebrating and sharing her arrival into the world, and how proud and excited I felt. Though a small part of that came from the fact that all the attention was on me and my mom had bought my favourite kind of chocolates, and I got to keep all the leftovers. I kept answering, proudly, “Eleonora!”, when kids asked me what her name was. I knew it was beautiful, even if unsure why. I thought it sounded regal, and she really did grow into it.

She got to sleep in my old bed, which is more of a cot I was barely fitting in anymore. My parents tried getting me to sleep in the other room, I was big enough to be on my own now, they had to sleep in the same room as her. But a few nights in and a bad wind storm making our old wooden panelled windows whistle all throughout the night, I asked to go back to sleeping next to our mom, my bad banished to what was supposed to be my bed, across our apartment. I don’t remember her crying or making a fuss at all. She was just there.

The next big memory, as I call them, is from a couple years later when I realised how cool it is to have an older sister. I’m not entirely sure where that came from, friends in school or tv, but the desire to have an older sister suddenly made me very upset that not only did I not have one, but I had been assigned that very role, probably for the rest of my life. Which, at age 8 or 9, felt like eternity. My lack of human biology knowledge still significant, I kept thinking about how maybe my mom might be able to make me one. Then a couple more years passed by and the realisation fully sank in, I was the older sister. It wasn’t fair!

Then came the pandemic in 2020 and I found myself back in our childhood room, stuck together. I had lived in the UK for nearly three years by that point, during which I had rarely checked in directly with my sister. But as the days went by and boredom and anxiety got to us, our sleep schedules ruined by the lack of any other structure to our days, we started talking. Eleonora was now almost 16. She had her own stories, views, ways of doing things. She had dreams and a music taste oddly similar to mine, a strange thing to consider because we had never talked about it before, subjects in school she loved and others she didn’t. We kept out mom awake until 2am because we couldn’t stop laughing at silly things on the internet. Bonded over individual and collective family trauma and dysfunction, each sharing our own experiences of it. Trying to laugh it off.

These days, we live two time zones apart. Eleonora lives in Sofia, I live in London. We either see each other in cities across Europe or she visits me here, depending on where our favourite artists are playing. It all started in Hamburg in the summer of 2022 when I surprised her with concert tickets to a now absolute favourite musician, and it has become our little tradition, our way of spending time together. Every year we go to two or three gigs, travel around as much as money and our jobs or studies allow. I don’t stay with her when I’m in Sofia, as she shares a studio flat with her partner. The childhood room in our home town sits empty most of the year, and we’re rarely ever there at the same time.

Yet we talk way more often that we used to. The sharing of a physical space has been removed for now, but I’m so grateful it hasn’t stood in the way of us getting closer. We’re both adults now. I think we have both realised how important and precious this little thing is, us being friends. We often joke about it and all the quarrels we used to have as kids, how ridiculous they seem now. “I’m glad we’re friends now”, we’d say.

And I never stop taking pictures of her now, whenever I get the chance. It's sort of a full circle moment, back to when we were quite young and I was trying to learn how to take photos and gently bullying her into being my model. I've gone through various styles and approaches to my photography throughout the last 10 years but her presence in it is constant. While we may not have been friends during her early teens and therefore my album sits empty for that period, I've told myself I won't let that happen again.