The Persistence of Memory

Oh 

mourning dove 

of my heart,

you inconsolable cooing thing,

each beat riddled with grief. 

You alone know my beloved ashes, 

cloudy feathers sarcophagusing my blood and veins. 

You run away with every sunrise yet you 

find yourself unchanged. You lacerate my words and turn 

every saturated childhood memory pale. You know mourning 

in the morning before stale dawn, the 

ache when there is no face 

to place your love. By 

night you are silenced 

by the heat 

of the

Moon.

Souris-

A mourning dove cooed outside my window this morning, haunting wavering notes. I thought of you, how you would know what the particular call meant, or inform me that they mate for life. Do they? Their calls are so lonely.

How many different ways must I write for you to recall we’re sisters, whatever prefix or fraction may precede the title? I'd sever myself in half to feel as you do, a pill cut down the middle, so that we could each taste the same acridity, if it would convince you to un-run away, re-run away. Which is the right prefix? The point is, the crumbs of words don’t matter to me, they’re only the leftovers after all. Come back. Run away, again, to what you left behind. Whichever makes you happiest.

Memories are fickle, flooding my mind, waterfalling from my ears. They tickle my shoulders and trickle onto the ground, ribbons and spatters of my life muddled under my feet. Usually, when I catch a glimpse of your face reflected on the floor, the memory is gone before my pen licks paper. But there’s clarity, now. The evening after Whittier’s funeral, Lily mentioned something that I thought you should know. 

Our conversation started mild, the early spring light we coaxed to fall across our faces on the deck. You know how it is in Chicago, the wavering light and the biting air, but if you sit in just the right spot, the warmth spreads across your skin, glowing buds sprouting on the sun. Sunflowers. That’s what I was painting, strokes caressing the woven canvas, a mother’s hand on her daughter’s cheek. We were clad in black, darkness thirsting for the sunlight.

I concocted a joke about her dilapidated Fleetwood Mac album, her laughter bright and rich vanilla when her voice faltered and she gazed off as if trying to conjure a misplaced dream. “I haven’t played a record since he left.” A mundane discovery whose dull blade severed my brain from my body. My paintbrush clattered from my hand. I didn’t bother retrieving it.

I immediately understood who she spoke of. It’s stupid not to use his name, to treat it like a mine that chasms the earth, a shattered mug that doesn’t understand how to heal.

Whittier, I exhaled. Only I could hear the aromatic breath, a spiral-cut lemon peel, bright and bitter. For that moment, he was mine alone, a reflection through a car window, his visage superimposed over my own until the mirage disappeared as his name blurred from my tongue.

Lily stared out over the deck, eyes still glazed over, sight stolen by the setting sun. “Tell me about the day he left.” My voice was soft yet bold. I demanded, not suggested. “Tell me.” Selfish. She is his wife– was– and the imposition was impulsive, jolting me like caffeine. I shouldn’t have imposed, shouldn’t have implored her to surrender what few seconds were theirs alone. 

But maybe, as his twin, I’m entitled to some things. We are, as his sisters, entitled to doze in the glow of his moon, soaking in every enchantment of his brief existence as though we’re herbs.

She remained quiet for a while, perhaps entertaining guarding the memory, but she didn’t refuse, just gave me a curt nod.

November 4, 1968. Lily’s eyes opened before the sun’s, alone. You were asleep across the hall, tangled in a world where the night froze into brittle icicles, preserving Whittier with frost. 

She searched for Whittier, discovering him at the radiator next to his armchair in the living room. His image held her captive in the doorway, her eyes carving his figure deliberately into the stony morning. I envisioned her painting the inside of her eyelids with his silhouette the way the sun’s luster wafts like soap bubbles across your eyes once you come into shadow. The soft crescent of his long lashes. The curve of his neck, tendons bulging. His new buzz cut, the ghost of his auburn mane. Do you remember how his earthy eyes bled muddy tears when he brought me the shears and a razor and asked me to cut? Most of all I remember how he avoided the mirror. 

He leaned into the radiator, wedging his nose into a valley of that iron mountain range, eyes closed as if he cackled, head thrown back to the sky. It’s strange, him smelling the radiator— I couldn’t fathom an explanation. Lily suggested it was the warmth. That it was comforting.

She thought of inquiring after what he was doing, but couldn’t think of how to respond to any explanation. Instead, she cooed, “Good morning,” melting into the light and leaning against the doorway, eyes swollen with fatigue, a shiver jolting through her and her thin robe. He frantically searched the dawn for the noise’s source. “Sorry, it’s just me.” She, like you, creeps with accidental stealth. “Why are you up so early?”

His muscles relaxed at her identification, and he answered simply, “I don’t know.” 

Lily didn’t need an answer. She knew he hadn’t slept all night. His eyes were drawn to the rough plaster of their bedroom ceiling, preoccupied with discerning shapes like clouds, so focused he didn’t notice her following his gaze, tracing the figures with him. There was a cicada, she thought, delicate wings spun into the cracks, and it reminded her of those childhood stories he told her about you and me. How he would drive us around all night, the air warm and crackling through the cracked window, alive like Zotz fizzing on my tongue. How he watched us in his peripheral, you heavy humidity asleep across my lap. 

He turned to the window, fidgeting, watching the dark sky wake, and repeated, “I don’t know.”

She didn’t respond. The radiator hummed in place of her voice as she stared at Whittier, who ran his nail along the lifeline on his palm, sowing seeds to sprout. He waited for her to speak, the silence stretching, gooey taffy. Finally, Lily entreated tenderly, “Are you okay?” a valley crevicing itself between her thick eyebrows.

He didn’t answer. How could he? The discussion of anything real was an unbearable torment. She heard enough in his pensive silence. “I-” she started, attempting to put words to what lingered in the air, but he interrupted.

“Dance with me,” he proposed, voice raw, the wind whistling against their brick apartment. Standing from his armchair, he took her hand, tucked flyaway strands of hair behind her ear. As he met her eyes, she looked for tears, a hint of wetness in the corner of his earthen eyes. There was nothing but betrayal. 

Your emotions won’t suit you in the real world, Alice, he insisted. Did he cry once he left, later in Vietnam, shadowed by death? I imagined his torment at his bleached understanding, paled by years in the sun, faded by the jungle. Justifications for the world’s order revealed themselves to be fatuous, rules conceded that they were arbitrary. 

Wars lacked valor. 

I brought my hand to my face and wiped imagined tears away as he may have, imagining him contemplating his reflection in the metal of his tarnished gun. When did I stop being a child? perhaps he wondered. When did I learn to cry like one? 

Lily’s voice broke through my imaginings at that point. She was now recounting how Whittier asked for a second time to dance, faking a smile. “So”–his voice cracked– “will you dance with me?” He extended a hand to her. “Please?” Serious eyes, longing fingers grasping for any tangible reminder that their hearts pulsed.

He watched her, waiting for a response. “I- “ her voice caught and her head fell, a severed marionette. There were no words for goodbye, every possibility rejected before greeting her lips, sallow and sickly. 

She wept in his arms, indignant and something she didn’t recognize. She described it as a hollow weight, floating and sinking with the waves, drifting solitarily in the sea. I think she must have meant grief. 

He comforted her, caressed her chin upwards, and clung to her face, a precious relic. “You’re okay,” he reassured, staring into her eyes. She let him wipe away her tears, but more came stronger than before, fueled by fury. He could maintain an illusion of placidness but she wouldn’t be complicit. 

“Okay?” she echoed incredulously. “No.” She shook her head, swatting his hands away. “No. You can’t make me pretend.” She began to leave the room. “I won’t pretend that-” she stopped as he caught her hand and squeezed it.

“Lily,” he said, quietly. And then, again, so she would look at him, “Lily,” as if it was an explanation, the sacred word in their secret language. The two syllables lilted on his tongue the way music notes whisper secrets to the musician, the way clays smooths and folds into love letters to the sculptor, the way the sun sings to the summer. He spoke it as if it meant I love you and, to him, it did.

There was just silence. Held breaths. “Fine.” She traipsed over to the record player, wiping her face as she put the needle on the record already in place. The music fizzled to life, Ella Fitzgerald’s “All Through the Night.” 

So they danced. She forgot her sorrow and giggled as they staggered back into the bookshelf and into each other, an animated daydream. He was a vacant stare. She saw the conclusion spelled out in the corner of his stern mouth, saw a stop sign hiding in his throat behind smiling teeth. They were drowning but it didn’t matter so long as it felt like a dance. As dawn broke they forgot the lines that made them lonely, forgot that stars who appear close are lifetimes apart. They burned in solitude, separate yet maintaining the illusion that their fingers would touch if they stretched themselves far enough. They found joy in the movement.

Then Lily stopped telling me about that morning and went quiet for a long while because that’s the part when he left. 

“We were never meant to remain stationary, were we?” Lily eventually remarked as we shifted our chairs to where the beams of sun had veered. You and I already knew that. We feel the rhythm and abandon the rules, inhaling purpose, exhaling exaltation. “Sometimes, if I close my eyes and spin with the world beneath me, I can almost convince myself that I am dancing with Whittier,” she confessed. “Like it was the end of the world.”

It was the end of the world.

I didn’t know what to say after that. I should have thought of something comforting, something hopeful. Instead, I made a noise in agreement and excused myself, abandoning my art, hurrying off to the bathroom, and bolting the door. I sat on the tub’s edge for an hour, ebbing with the ceiling light’s reflection in the subway tile walls and playing with my plastic yellow toothbrush, sweeping the bristles under my finger, a broom across a dusty floor. 

There was something familiar about the toothbrush. I couldn’t place it, not until I allowed myself to be swallowed by time, digested and disoriented. For a moment, I wasn’t twenty-five and Whittier hadn’t died and I was in our kitchen in our trailer in Chelsea, watching you brush your teeth while I waited my turn.

I see us now. Whittier and I are seventeen and you’re nine, your bony frame overcast by cloudy hair and stormy eyes. It's the last time we’re all together before I amplify the static of farmland into bustling city streets, foraging for sound. Before Whittier is hand-fed bullets and poured goblets of Agent Orange. Before you run away because when he pens his apologies and sprints into that minefield, chanting to the earth to take him back, swearing the final corpse hand he'll hold as Death will be his own, he forgets your fingers are entwined with his. He smothers you with the aftershock and implores you to remain; to stay would be to fuse into fleshy nothing.

I see us now. The damp morning air wafts from the window, greying the pinstriped wallpaper that ripples around your gyrating elbow, mouth foaming with mint, closed around a toothbrush identical to one I'll have in eight years. Mouth full of birds, garbled details about a mourning dove. They do mate for life. “Keep brushing,” Whittier reminds you, buttering a piece of toast, one side infested with char. You groan, despising the way the bristles explore the gaps and your gums, stiff and desiccated, sipping a glass of sand. It doesn’t help that your toothbrush is two years old, disintegrating, the loose nylon poking your tongue, lost eyelashes. We can’t afford a new one.

You're cuts short when the bristles come loose in clumps. You scrape them off with your nails, coating your fingertips with fluorescence, minty wishes clinging to the whorls in your skin, refusing to be blown away by pursed lips. They worm on your wet skin, patterns eaten into wood until the oak is digested from the inside. 

I see us now. There’s something morose about the bristles. Synthetic, directionless dreams, nowhere to travel, pulling away like endless weeds uprooted from the ground. Grasping for family. Trapping each other in tangled roots, mapless dimensions. 

I open my mouth to tell you to stop now, but Whittier doesn’t notice the state of your toothbrush. “Susan Marie,” he warns sternly. You flick the neon into the sink and go on brushing with just the plastic, silent aside from the bare handle’s plinks, playing your teeth like a xylophone. 

I should tell him it's falling apart but I don’t. I can’t recall why. It's all pointless. From the start, the toothbrush is fated to erode, soft stone. From the start, it will be left bare. 

Start again. 

I see us now. I replay it in my mind. The bristles will find their way this time. They won’t sound the same, hairs ripped from follicles, like Whittier’s scalp left bare when war warmed his doorstep and set him ablaze, a wound winding into baldness. 

I see us now. Blinded by youthful arrogance, we would have never known that was a novelty, all of us together. The toothbrush is falling apart and soon, the gravity keeping us in orbit of each other will, too.

I see us now. You, the sister who lives in fractals of sunlight and shadow caught by mosaic tile. Whittier, the brother who mends everything until he has no thread to stitch himself. Me, who doesn’t know how to convince you that the fragments of a person don’t flee each other, water and oil. 

I saw us while I sat in the bathroom until I was done looking. We'd become my own reflection, and I was bored of the familiar face. I tossed my toothbrush haphazardly onto the pedestal sink and left to prepare dinner. 

All I could think of was Whittier hiding his nose in the radiator. I mulled over his reasons as I shredded lettuce for a salad and I thought of it while eating, and then, as I ran warm water for the dishes, steam wafting off the lapping cascade from the faucet, I finally understood it. I think it must have been the scent. Their apartment, that’s exactly what it always smells of. Steamed bathrooms, boiled water before the tea bag bleeds herbal blood, a sink full of water before the pile of dirty dishes. The scent of warmth, and underneath it all, pulsing notes of vanilla, Lily’s perfume.

Once I was done washing up and Lily took her leave to tidy up, I went over to Whittier’s armchair, faded emerald framed with fraying golden threads, and I did just as he must have. I sank my nose into the blistering metal, hot like the sun with my eyes closed, milky like the moon when I opened them, pretending I was Whittier. I imagined I was collecting the scent for when my memory decayed with distance, scattered letters on a damp forest floor feasted on by mushroom growth. It was like swallowing every brick and window pane that constructs their tiny apartment and tasting it through the lacerating scent. 

Afterward, I sat on the armrest, tracing every minute detail in the ornamental metalwork, my fingertips numbing, astronaut footprints winding into florets. I don’t know how long I sat there. At some point, Lily appeared from the kitchen and asked to take me for a drive, and I agreed so that was the end of it. 

What I have to share with you is nothing. Inessential, not so interesting at all. But I thought I should share because I’m no longer seventeen and know how to use my words. And so, before I surrender to your silence, I'll try to force comprehension.

Being is severed into fractions. The vinculum isn’t blood, a scar lit scarlet jagged on the sky. I know you feel the shreds and believe it's because you’re not whole, but that is a vicious lie you feed yourself. We never needed to share a surname, Whittier, you, and I. We’re the weeds that hold each other’s bodies, tearing themselves apart for the other, uprooted again and again and again. We’ll always embrace the displacement for each other. We’ll always abandon the nutrients, the soil and water. We’ll always face the pure and undiluted sunlight together, raisined and shriveling.

One day, you'll understand.

—Alice