Adam,
I’ve been home for 2 years, 9 months, and 8 days. That is 1,011 days total. Roughing out some kind of average, I’d say that means I’ve let you cum inside me 585 times. Assuming you ejaculate the average 3.7 mL. standard among men, that means that over the course of that time, you’ve put inside me, in small and only specifically noticed applications, almost exactly 9 cups of semen. Just over a half a gallon, and ⅓ the amount of blood in my veins.
And so I become your sister, in applications as small and unnoticed, starting from a set-point in space where I was much closer to being her than anyone else on the planet, beforehand. Simple, really. I could have been born her, and maybe I was. But I am being made her, regardless; a carrier of your DNA, a sleeping twin of you buried in my skin. Do you chase me down your own blood vessels, Adam? I think you must, you must have said, you must have said as much, at some point I can’t remember. I can’t really remember, Adam, how much we are the same. I can’t remember. And that’s good, I think. Don’t you?
Two nights ago, I was locked in a room of my own design healing a wide patch in the earth dug by the wing of an airplane into the frozen ground. Buddy Holly’s plane cartwheeled and dug up the Iowa dirt for 540 feet. That’s almost a hundred of me, laying end-to-end, arms folded neatly over my chest in the snow. Is there anything so violent to the world as a musician falling from the sky?
Are we musicians, Adam? I asked and you never answered. You said only, “Evelyn, you’ve broken your spine,” and in a rage tore the sheet music off of every piano I’ve ever owned in indignation that it would be the music in the end that killed me. Adam, how do I die? I’m never sure, and as my brother, I feel like it must be up to you, at the end of all things, to tell me. As we embark on this winter, maybe there’s an answer waiting for me somewhere, because God knows if I am living or dead, what I’ll need is more answers.
Do you think I’m beautiful? I hate to ask. I know you must. You must have said. You must have said as much. I remember times you have. But I thought I’d ask because I was locked in a room of my own design, wherein I wrote nonsense on the walls, or always had, and watched you read it, and assign to it the specific nature of magic to be unending, and in a moment, your actions reminded me that you’ve always been my name whether I could read it or not, and the places I placed it on the walls were beckons to you to always be with me, and when I realized that we shared a name, like you said, well. Bonnie and Clyde ran past me, blonde and brunette children, screaming in children’s glee, and I remembered that there was never a home I’ve ever occupied alone.
Adam, I took a knife. 2 ¾ inches, a paring knife sharply-tipped at the end. The blister inside me that forced me to once again wonder if you were real stung hot inside me like the pain behind your eyes when you’ve been awake too long and with none of your sleepless pleasurable results. Just awake, and nothing beyond that but the sun. I took the knife and pressed it into the flesh of my hip and carved, repeatedly, hands shaking and muscles of my legs hot and tired against the endorphins of pain, the letter M.
I’m not sure why. Maybe because without you, all that’s left of me is the shame of losing what I would never have held onto. The sacrifice of living past childhood is the inability to believe in it’s promise, to anyone but us. Maybe it was because it doesn’t matter what it is that we write, but only that we write it, with an understanding that it’s our name, or our language, from one of us to the rest. It might have been your height, Adam, on the door jamb of your kitchen, and I’d know where to find you.
-M
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