Things do not remember you

From a writing group exercise, The smallest thing I’ve ever experienced.

D, my sister’s friend, puts one of her tiny, thin silver rings on my finger. We’ve been going through all Karen’s jewelry, tagging and bagging for the garage sale the next day. I don’t wear jewelry much anymore — I have a ring worn all the time because it was handmade for my Aunt Annie, who gave it to me when I was a teenager. Once in a while I wear earrings or necklaces, but rarely. D thinks I should have this ring to remember Karen by; I didn’t take the last ring she put on my finger, a few days after Karen died. Instead, I gave it to her grieving friend who’d arrived too late to say goodbye, who couldn’t comprehend the empty rooms at my sister’s house, who was weirded out, like I was, to see so many people already wearing Karen’s jewelry so soon after she was gone.

It comforts them — attaches her to them — because she had so much jewelry and it holds strong associations. It represents her. There are hundreds of small plastic bags full of rings, earrings, necklaces, even a few pins and brooches, which none of us can remember her wearing in life. But this time, when D gives me the ring, I wait until her back is turned and put it in the bag with the other tiny silver treasures. I’m not that sentimental about things — when I’m done with them, I’m usually done. If I keep things, I keep them so they will provoke a specific memory. In a way those serve as the diary I don’t keep — they will give me a recounting of an event, a place, without my needing to write it down. They imprint their past on me, on their surface.

There are some things I will be sentimental over, but my tendency for sentiment is vastly different from others’, I know. D might not understand why I won’t take the ring, and it’s best to not try to explain. What I do keep is just as inexplicable: her shampoos, skin care, fragrances, makeup, a few stray items of clothing, and the cheaper décor items that she used in the less-seen spaces of her beautifully decorated home. Karen would laugh at me for taking her cheap, plain Target curtains and the inexpensive throw. She would bray derisively, “Those things? I can’t believe you’re taking that crap.” But the curtains were hers, and used in the room I stayed in when I took care of her, and the chenille throw was near her when she died. We shopped for the skin care, the beauty stuff, the Barney’s clothes, when she came to town because those were her favorite things to do. That was our annual treat: to spend our birthday buying things we didn’t need at shops we shouldn’t have gone to. It isn’t that she wore the clothes or used the creams, or that the fragrances conjure her memory, because the memory is still so painful to me I prefer to not conjure it at all. It only matters that these things give me touchstones: dates, times spent together, shared interests and passions. She wore the jewelry, but that isn’t what binds her things to me. Whether she used something or not, it holds value when it has a memory I can hold on to.

This half life

Most people who write about twins are not twins. They write from a perspective of study, often, a journalistic eye cast on something they won’t fully understand. Occasionally a creative writer takes the topic up for fiction. But they are always outside looking in. Rarely have I had a chance to see my own face represented, to hear stories like my sister’s and mine from writers who know what it means to be a twin.

Writers tend to get caught in the lines of cliché, stereotype, patness. They like the stories of twins who wear identical clothes, are impossible to distinguish, where both marry guys named Ed and always wear purple and live next door to each other and collect unicorn figurines. I meet some twins like this; mostly I meet twins like my sister and I, those with differences physical and emotional, who seek their own identities. Who like being a twin, but don’t think of it as their sole identity.

I spent my life like this, as so many of my twin friends did — searching for my own self, apart from being “the twins.” Someone with a distinct name, not one alliterative burst crammed together with an and. Someone whose abilities and talents were different from my twin’s, but complementary. I was eager to stand alone, be recognized for who I was. Who I was. But it’s not exotic or story-worthy to talk about such twins; we’re not much different than any other very close siblings who look a great deal alike. At least, I think it’s not interesting to outsiders driven by the image of otherworldliness twins provide.

We were not mirror images, the way so many people think of twins. We didn’t hold a hand up to the mirror to see it match perfectly on the other side. Even if we had been mirror images, we wouldn’t have wanted to be. We knew we were twins, didn’t need to show it to the rest of the world. Instead we were split in the middle, two sides of a coin, halves of a whole. Karen went one way, I went the other. We could still stick that hand out, only rather than a mirror showing me that hand placed against mine in perfect replication, we encountered each other’s hands, a left and a right, and held them there together when it suited us. Even though we’d gone different ways, I could look in a mirror and see, not her face reflecting, but my own, Karen standing behind me, just at the edge of my shoulder. A hand like mine was always there, waiting for when it was needed, in the space between us.

Now, though, there is no other hand to grab on to, hold on for comfort, guide me. There’s nothing there but dead space, cold air, darkness. I keep reaching out my hand but nothing touches me back. The only side of the coin is mine; there is a half-person, falling, falling. Unable to stay upright because there is no balance to be found with so much of me missing.

It would have been so easy if we could have been those cliché twins. She could have understood the things I didn’t say, the agony I felt for her but never had the chance to express. She would have known because we would have had a secret language like story-worthy twins share, or the telepathic communication everyone wanted, as I was growing up, to believe all twins have. I would not be left with the burden of unspoken love and fear and dread. And maybe, just maybe, I might have been some comfort in her last excruciating hours. But she didn’t know, and couldn’t hear me. We relied on words, like regular people. We were not special and mysterious and different. I needed to be in those last days, but couldn’t.

We were never really apart, no matter how much space or irritation or exasperation separated us. It was always our birthday, we remember, let’s do this. You always know there is that person, just off your shoulder in the mirror, who is you. When that half of you is gone, the mirror is such a black, empty space, and you fall into it, no hand to pull you back up.