When you left so did I, and so maybe none of this matters. I still remember your face at the airport, moon-white and sharp, the downcast eyelashes lush with tears. You’d told me before that you shouldn’t have worn mascara, you should’ve known you’d cry - but I don’t think either of us knew it until the harsh lights refracted them in your wide blue eyes. You had one suitcase, a pillow, an overnight bag - I’d helped you lug the ancient thing through the airport. I don’t know how you managed to do that, to pack a single life away so effortlessly. They say no one touches us so lightly they leave no trace - but you were always a step ahead, around a corner, down the street, and I was always in your shadow.
I responded to your absence the only way I knew how: seeking to find someone who could carve a place inside me as you had. But as long as I waited, and as hard as I tried, these strangers only shaped an emptiness that I couldn’t fill.
I had you measured precisely as clockwork. I knew the way you pulled at your sooty lashes, how you hitched up the jeans on your thin hips, how dry your lips were when he kissed you. People are creatures of habit, so willing to walk the same paths over and over until the circles at last recede back upon themselves. I remembered when you had your dark hair - almost as dark as mine - shorn, how when you came to class I could see the tawny column of your neck, the freckles near the coil of your spine. It was frightening, strangely beautiful, your throat elongated and narrow, high and sunny-gold.
I remember. You were young and so was I, you the stranger that I’d always known. I asked you if you believed in reincarnation, souls rebirthing and souls passing on underneath the skein of heaven. Souls never dying. It was a strangely comforting thought. You said I wouldn’t have known you then - I said this wasn’t true. Maybe in some other lifetime we weren’t friends, but maybe we were something different. Maybe I was a cat, I said, a housecat that purred in warmth, who tilted her head in want of adoration. But you disagreed. I wasn’t a cat, you said, I was your sister, your mother. Your lover. I was something else.
Now I medicate myself to sleep, two oblong pills tipped back with tepid tap water. I lie to you. I tell you that I’m sober, that I’m happy, that I found someone to fill the aching cavity you left behind. Your life is glossy like a magazine, jagged golden coasts and the water heartbreak-blue, the lovely and dangerous people of Los Angeles so endlessly fascinating to your new eyes. Forgetting is a form of forgiveness, I think. But I close my eyes and see on the backs of my eyelids a ghost etched in perfect color, that almost formless beauty, the eyes blue as summer. The fan of your lashes and the curl of your perfect nose. I can see your thin sunbrowned arms, the boys’ shirts you always wore, and - this is when my heart jumps into my throat - I hear your voice. Rough and lovely and low and hoarse. I try to shunt you away, close myself away - but the truth is that since you left all of my sins have looked just like you.