lie no. 31 | 12.08.19

My parents told me I’d been a twin when I was a child. They found out they’d lost one of their two baby girls to heart complications midway through the third trimester, but back then (honestly, I have no idea, maybe today, too?) the surviving twin took priority so we both stayed in there until I was ready.

It wasn’t a topic that came up a lot, or really ever—except, that is, on the pages of stories I wrote the next couple years that centered around twins.

I recently read one such story I wrote in fifth grade that won a writing competition (why I didn’t stick to this “sport,” I’ll never know) and went on to become my first piece published in a newspaper.

What struck me was the ease with which I seemed to describe the relationship between a fictional set of twin sisters. I should mention this story was set in Kansas during in the 1950s—a place and time I also know nothing about, further suggesting my imagination has always been my strongest muscle.

I was relieved to find it was a relatively uplifting read. I guess a part of me expected it to be loaded with sad undertones, some sign of distress gone unnoticed.

I remember asking my mom when I was younger if it was a sad day, my birthday. She said it was bittersweet, but mostly a day filled with joy for having one healthy baby girl. It’s the same answer I got when I asked again this year. It’s the right answer—it’s the only answer—I can imagine a loving mother giving a child asking such an impossible question.

Every few years a twin-related thought would jog across my mind when, say, someone I knew was having twins, but that was about it.

I’d all but forgotten about it entirely over the years. Not intentionally, it just wasn’t part of my identity. It was one of those memories that lost weight over time, not one that gained it—as its caretaker I suppose this should’ve concerned me more than it did.

On my 35th birthday I dug out my birth certificate, which I hadn’t looked at in years. Not by choice, I needed it for the DMV to replace my expiring driver’s license. (The checkbook I grabbed at the same time was to pay my quarterly taxes due that day—mix in the flu and 35 started out as a real party.)

Right under my name on the document it says “twin.” Next to that it lists my birth order: first.

Birth certificates, not unlike obituaries, never tell the whole story of a person. I get that.

But everything about this piece of paper was wrong. I’m not a twin. The place I’m from didn’t feel like my home. My parents are still my parents, of course, but not in the way they used to be. Even my mother’s birthday was listed incorrectly, something I’d never noticed before.

I mean, for fuck’s sake. Mere minutes after dramatically deciding to go all in on paying more attention to my life, I was reminded of death and all that was but is no more.

It felt cruel. It felt like a punch in the gut. It also felt really fucking stupid. Maybe it was just the Tamiflu.

But then it came up again at the DMV.

Ok, thought! Keep it moving. Time to jog along now!

The woman helping me jokingly asked if Baby B had also waited till the last minute to renew their driver’s license. Then she started telling me about her own twin boys and how similar they are in that respect, so thankfully I didn’t have to respond.

I never did shake the thought that day. It stuck around, which was unusual. It seemed to be jogging in place, as if trying to get my attention.

That night Matt took me out for an early dinner—he wasn’t about to let a pesky flu stand in the way of celebrating. On the way home I mindlessly scrolled through Instagram until a post stopped my finger in its tracks.

The Discover section of Instagram had become as much of an algorithmic mind reader (fortune teller? self-fulfilling prophecy?) as my Spotify account.

In an admittedly unhealthy way, Instagram and Spotify made me feel seen and heard at a time when I felt neither in the offline world. Both apps always knew what I needed, when I needed it (because I was telling them—funny how that works).

I’d spent the majority of the past year wanting someone, anyone, to see my encrypted cries for help as what they were and reach out—if algorithms could do it, why couldn’t people?

A few tried, but no one could give me what I needed—which, it turns out, was exactly what I needed.

The irony is not lost on me, at least now. I’d spent the past decade treating my pain exactly how I didn’t want to be treated by others. I belittled it. I pushed it away. I told it to be quiet. I told it it wasn’t important and didn’t matter.

And so, after years of not allowing my pain to be seen or heard—ignoring it and rolling my eyes at it—I was ready to surrender and pay attention to it.

I didn’t expect Ernest Hemingway to be the messenger and decades-old grief be the message, but hey, as of earlier that morning, I was trying my best to stop scripting the story ahead of time so there was no ink on my hands here.

“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep,” Mr. Hemingway wrote, clearly at a time in which he did not have the flu.

“Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

I had the anger part down, but the rest of it, not so much. I tended to be better at playing dead, only going through the motions.

It would’ve been her birthday, too, I thought for the first time ever as I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. The punches, now merciless, picking up pace.

I wanted to blame the Tamiflu again, or at the very least those dark clouds above me, the ones I couldn’t seem to escape, but honestly?

I’d never really looked at it like this probably because she died before she was born, before we were born, or at least delivered sequentially on our due date.

Death before birth gets a little confusing semantically—and in other ways, I suppose.

For the first time in 35 years, the whole thing suddenly struck me as really sad—that I’d never thought about it this way, that she hadn’t even made it to what should’ve been our first birthday let alone 35th and mostly how traumatic all of this must’ve for my parents.

Curiosity always gets the best of me. So how had I never been curious about any of this before now? Of all the rabbit holes I dive down, when, and why, had I filled in this particular one like a grave? I’ve wasted massive amounts of time chasing the dumbest of curiosities, so why would I bury this?

I wondered if my parents thought about her every year on my birthday. I can’t imagine how devastating an experience like that had to be for them, how it impacted their relationship with each other, with themselves, with me. I’d certainly never asked them.

Only this year, after Mexico, did I learn about how they had the nursery all ready to go for two when they learned they’d lost one; how the second crib and other items unexpectedly made redundant that day had been cleared from the nursery while my parents were out of the house. Only after Mexico did I learn there’d been an autopsy. Only after Mexico did I notice two cribs in a picture I have of my father standing in my childhood bedroom—the same room I’d go on to sleep in that brass daybed I rediscovered at the beach house after the hurricane—a photo I’d looked at countless times before.

As children, even adult ones, we tend to think of our parents’ lives before we came along as relegated to an outdated volume of the story, one no longer in print or found on shelves. We know it once existed, but that’s about all, having only ever been exposed to the story’s revised version, updated and released after us. Maybe this had always seemed to fall into the former for me.

My parents did the absolute best they could at the time to break this news to me as a child. They offered me all the opportunities in the world to ask any questions I wanted, whenever I wanted. I just didn’t know what to ask.

Fast forward to Mexico and I had nothing but questions. I just didn’t know why.

As the shaman guided me out of the imaginary forest, he added something about a fear of abandonment and impulse to abandon before being abandoned. My attention, though, was laser-focused on getting out of the forest by that point.

Everything he had said resonated in some way, even if it made zero sense. As both a professional and hobbyist sensemaker, I knew I was in trouble. Big trouble.

“How do you feel, Rebecca?” he asked. “You can start to wiggle your fingers and toes [ha!] and then sit up whenever you’re ready.”

That’s what masseuses usually say at the end of a massage as they bring you out of that sleepy, dream-like state you’re in. Which, it turns out, is eerily similar to how I felt after whatever that had just been.

“Like my soul, or something other than my body, just got a deep-tissue massage,” I said as I stretched my arms as best as I could beneath all the layers. “I’m sore in places I didn’t know existed.”

We went back to his desk and talked a little while longer before I handed over my pesos and left.

I didn’t know how, or if, I was going to tell Matt about any of this. In the past year I’d put him through a lot. Or, more accurately, I’d been through a lot and he’d stuck around. I didn’t have much desire to add “womb trauma” to my shit-to-deal-with list.

My honey-heal list was already pretty damn long at the time.

…

Matt texted as he was getting ready for bed that night to ask about my last day in Mexico.

“It was intense,” I replied. “It was very woo woo, even for me.”

“I don’t even know what that means!” he wrote back.

We simultaneously googled “woo woo” and sent each other screenshots of the definition.

Mine said, “dubiously or outlandishly mystical, supernatural or unscientific.”

His said, “descriptive of an event or person espousing New Age theories such as energy work... can also be a synonym for sketchy. Sedona, AZ, is the self-proclaimed woo woo capital of the world.”

Neither provided either of us much comfort or clarity.

“I’ve never done more googling during a text convo,” he replied after I told him I’d seen a shaman who’d cleared my chakras. “Go on...”

I went on to tell him everything else but left out the twin stuff, feeling pretty dubious about that part myself.

I didn’t know what to make of it yet, and I’d recently noticed my urge to make sense of everything in real time tended to make matters messier.

I had a real innate knack for solving puzzles without all the pieces, sometimes even using all the wrong pieces.

“Just sit with it,” the shaman told me earlier. “Just sit with whatever it is you’re not sure about until you know. You’ll know when you know.”

Of all the things the shaman said, that last bit is the only thing I rolled my eyes at. Expressions like that are about as helpful as someone asking where you last remember having the thing you lost.

Matt asked if he could listen to the recording the shaman made. I froze.

At first I said no. Then, thinking that made a shady story sound even shadier I told him maybe, but only after I listened to it first. I didn’t know how long I’d need before I was ready to revisit it.

[Spoiler: I’d need three weeks, a full moon and a bench in Amsterdam.]

I sent him a video of the avian orchestra performing on my patio, the soundtrack to my writing session, and we said goodnight. Or at least we texted it.

The birds were gone by morning. For the first time since arriving in San Miguel, my alarm woke me up.

I’d set it to go off early so I could see the sun rise on my last day in Mexico, or maybe as a measure to avoid yet another proverbial wake-up call.

At dinner the night before my waiter asked the reason for my visit.

“It was a birthday gift to myself, some time and space to write,” I told him, the first person I’d admitted that to other than myself.

“Just like Ernest Hemingway!” he said. “You know he started writing The Sun Also Rises on his birthday, right?”

I didn’t know that, and immediately felt foolish. What I did know is I was nothing like Hemingway, an *actual* writer.

After he walked away and the heat receded from my cheeks, I thought about that book—once a favorite—and its title.

Seeing the sun come up on my last morning in Mexico suddenly meant everything to me. I’d gotten so preoccupied with the end, with the fall, I’d stopped really paying attention to the rise—in more ways than one.

After waking early I had the streets all to myself as I walked with such determination toward the perfect place to watch it.

It was one of those moments in life you instinctively know, no matter how silly it seems, will end up on the soundtrack. If only we scored our lives the way we score films—with musical notes, instead of points.

I had the whole place to myself, a good thing as I got pretty emotional watching nature’s reminder that what goes down also comes back up. Each day an opportunity to turn the page, but also to begin again on a new one.

For the first time in a long time, I had hope. Not just a glimmer of it, the actual thing pumping through my veins.

What I didn’t have was any desire to go home yet—and I had less three hours to make a plan.