We went to a sneak “hunger games” last night, because my aunt and uncle got the hook up. its pretty sweet – free happy hour at cheesecake factory and then see a movie before anyone else can? yeah…yeah i think i can fit that into my schedule.

the movie was everything i wanted it to be. i was glad that katniss wasn’t some super big name gorgeous girl. she was as normal as i pictured her. the games were violently depicted and as horrible as i wanted. I cried four times. stanley tucci can do no wrong. neither can dad sutherland.

but i realized that what draws me the most to this book series and to these movies are the sisterly bonds. even though Prim is in about five seconds of the film, her parts are the most moving.

The thing is, it doesn’t matter the last conversation we had, the last nice thing they did for me, the worst thing they’ve ever done. More than my friends, more than my parents, I will do anything for my sisters. If you mess with them, that is IT.  I will end you.

If one of my sisters were called to the hunger games, I would volunteer myself as tribute. Not because I’m the oldest, not because it’s the noble thing to do, but because I love them because they are my sisters.

I am very close with my parents, I have best friends I would lay down my life for in a heartbeat, but nothing comes close to my sisters.

I can understand Katniss volunteering as tribute. I can understand promising a girl in pigtail braids that I will win and I will be back. I can understanding training to kill others so that I might survive and return, if only to a sister. I would  have held Rue through the night and buried her properly, too. I can understand that I would “fall in love” with someone because it looked good on TV. Because I would do it, too, if it would save me in order to be back to them.

Sisterhood is a complicated web of secrets that we all know, and secrets we know about each other. Things we want to say, things we can say, people dear to us. It is our parents, our grandparents, our aunts and uncles, and blaming them all. It is inside jokes, it is family history, and family fear. It’s not all roses, but it is something beautiful.