lie no. 33 | 12.17.19

Two weeks later I was boarding a flight to Amsterdam.

“Something about this trip feels… different,” I texted Matt from the airport. “I have this unexplainable unease.”

“I think you’re starting to take international travel for granted,” he replied. “Like, oh I’m just going to Amsterdam for a few days because I can.”

“No, that’s not it,” I said. “Also, I’m going to a conference.”

We both knew that last part was a lie. The conference was little more than a convenient excuse.

I hadn’t seen Matt in 10 days at this point—by design, my design. He had to travel for work the week after I got back from Mexico, and I had to be anywhere else.

Travel had become the needle keeping the tapestry of my life together, threading the fine line between my ravel and unravel.

I took that promise I made myself in the Dallas airport—to take the first out that arose—seriously. I also took the optics of it all pretty seriously—I knew I couldn’t book flights out of the country forever. Catching flights, not feelings might’ve been cute on the internet, but it wasn’t sustainable in real life.

To pull off this promise meant baking my next moves into an elaborate layer cake of justification, ensuring any way you sliced it, the knife always hit another perfectly palatable explanation.

“I never know where she’s gallivanting off to next!” Matt said to someone at my party as he squeezed my shoulder, his arm draped across my back.

Did he think this was all fun and games for me? Didn’t he know I’d trade anything to be busy again—with anything other than myself? Carrying a salad to and from meetings for eight hours a day was a walk in the park compared to this.

This—THIS—was the hardest work I’d ever done in my life. Gallivanting, it was not.

I always forget Matt’s more of a sheet cake—not everything he says has meanings buried beneath fondant and frosting—until I make my first cut.

Funny how the more simplicity I crave, the more complex I tend to make things.

The next day I tallied up how many days he’d traveled so far in 2019—two days into February, mind you—compared to me and stuck the stat in my holster for later. It probably lasted a couple hours there.

“Really?! No way,” he said, as I casually dropped the fact that he’d traveled more days than me this year into what I can only imagine was a wholly unrelated conversation. “Huh. I guess you’re right, a lot of mine’s been for work, though.”

Obviously wherever I went next was going to have to be work related. Noted.

It’s really hard to explain to someone you love that there’s somewhere else you need to be other than with them, some bigger priority than them, something more important than them.

Enter, work: humanity’s most socially acceptable, sacrificial scapegoat.

I figured if I considered this search of mine to be work, if I believed it truly was work, and I did, I should call it as much.

Double entendres are perfect places to hide the truth in plain sight, to lie without lying.

Matt and I often have entire conversations about two totally different things unintentionally. We do it all the time, I reasoned; what’s the harm in a little mimicry?

It was also a little like being in on an inside joke with myself, which added some much needed levity to my life at the time.

“Work was crazy today,” I’d say over dinner to describe a day spent devouring a wholly relatable memoir that brought me new perspectives as often as it brought me to my knees. “I have so much work to do tomorrow.”

It was honest. It was refreshing—even if I didn’t realize at the time the confidence it was giving me. I thought if I left the definition of “work” open to interpretation, I could rebuild his confidence in me. Turns out I was convincing myself more than anyone.

When Matt left for his trip, I packed up the car and dog and drove south. I needed to get back to the beach to finish writing that essay, the one that became Lie No. 22 instead.

I knew I couldn’t go to North Carolina and go straight to the empty beach house without also seeing family inland because, optics. I also knew I couldn’t say I was then leaving family, and Matt back in DC, to go to the beach alone for a week, because, again, optics and their pesky illusions.

I’d been playing around with the idea of building a tool to help communities rebuild post-disaster based on my experiences after Florence, so I went to the beach house under the guise of research.

No one bats an eye at the notion of applying curiosity and empathy in pursuit of better understanding as a means to problem solving—not to mention the time and resources required—when it’s a product, rather than a person.

I’ve said it before and it bears repeating for those in the back (where I often sit): Old habits in proving something to no one die hard.

I received an email while down south about a research and insights conference happening in Amsterdam and I couldn’t believe my luck.

It felt like the universe was finally working with me rather than against me, and it checked all the boxes: work-related, financially justifiable and on another continent.

“You’re never going to believe this,” I texted Matt. “I just got invited to an insights conference in Amsterdam!”

“That’s awesome, babe!” he replied. “When is it? Is it a panel or a solo deal?”

I clarified that it wasn’t an invitation to speak, just to attend. I left out the part where I’d personally been invited by a marketing email to pay the full-priced attendee fee. I also left out the part where I emailed a professional acquaintance helping organize it to ask for a discount—mostly the part where he suggested I not bother and instead attend the far bigger North American version coming up the following month.

“It’s next week,” I texted Matt as I completed the registration and paid. “Bad news is I can’t come to Miami with you, good news is it’s actually cheaper for me to fly to Amsterdam. I’m booking it.”

I could see him typing a response but one never did show up. Imagine if we gave ourselves even half the power we give those animated ellipses on our screens.

I pulled into the driveway at the beach house not long after Matt landed back in DC. His next work trip was in four days. Mine was in five. If I timed it right, he’d be halfway to Miami by the time I got home.

It’s not hiding if the other person knows where you are. (Right?) I didn’t totally understand it at the time, I just knew self sequestering was key to survival—mine, his or ours I’m still not sure.

Each morning that week, as Matt headed to work in Washington I knocked out work owed to clients from the kitchen table at the beach house. Why the table’s proximity to the ocean always seemed more important than the quality of my work, I do not know. As soon as I was confident the rest of the world was properly distracted by the busyness of business, I got to work for real. If a tree falls in the forest and all that...

I wrote my heart and soul out that week. I’d long since gotten used to my writing leading me to wildly different places than I set out to explore—hell, I’d even started to enjoy it—but this time was different. No matter where I started, without fail, I ran into the same wall.

Instead of ignoring it, and quite frankly finally exhausted from always running around it, I gave in to googling. The cursor taunted me as it blinked in the search bar, as if reminding me of the value of its artificial time and urging me to stop wasting it with my wishy-washiness.

I fancy myself someone who can—and does—google anything and everything. For the first time ever, I was actually a little afraid of what I’d find.

This is ridiculous, I thought. No one but the algorithms will know. Just do it!

“Effects of twin dying in womb,” I typed, maybe even turning my eyes as I let google autofill whatever should come next.

I had told my therapist about the shaman and the twin stuff when I got back from Mexico, trying to walk what I imagined to be a very fine line between a diagnosis I probably wouldn’t want and being placed in a 48-hour psychiatric hold. I dipped my toe in through my parents’ experience, and when she didn’t restrain me or push that emergency button I knew had to be in that office somewhere, I just went for it.

“I’m pretty confused about my experience, too, though,” I said. “I’m sure there’s research out there on this I just haven’t let myself look yet.”

I brushed it off as nothing and probably tried to change the subject, unsure if I was more curious about what the shaman had said about loss or how I felt about it—and I was hellbent on not making “the twin thing” a, well, thing.

She asked what I meant by “a thing.”

A year earlier I would’ve scoffed at the idea of anyone outside a war zone experiencing trauma, so it was uncomfortable to sit there desperately wanting to ask if this was something that could’ve fucked me up.

I was afraid I was looking for yet another excuse for being the way I am, which seemed hella counterproductive to the work I’d been doing in that room.

She told me it was not only possible, but plausible, to experience something traumatic in utero and be affected by it later in life.

Questions I didn’t ask out loud: Had I watched her die? Had I tried to do anything about it, even if I couldn’t? Had I tried to get my mom’s attention as it happened? Had I been scared? What was it like in those last few weeks? Had I been confused? Lonely? Had I even noticed?

I mean, I’ve seen Look Who’s Talking—and I most definitely watched it again that week at the beach—I just didn’t know how much of it was actually rooted in science, or even reality. Mostly, I didn’t want to be haunted by the idea of a Bruce Willis-voiced baby who looked like me.

In the privacy of the beach house that week the questions didn’t stop once they started. For all the bad raps isolation gets, it’s also a pretty safe space.

First google guided me to a piece in The New York Times about the uniqueness of twin grief.

It IS a thing, I thought right before realizing none of the twins in the article had died in the womb.

There was a phrase in the piece that stuck out at me though: twinless twin. I googled it.

This is how the best rabbit holes work. (I jotted down an idea for a children’s book: Alice in TherapyLand. You know she needed therapy after all that and that’s ok!)

No amount of therapy could’ve prepared me for where this one led me next.

Turns out there are support groups all over the world for twinless twins, nonprofits dedicated to researching them, therapists specializing in the topic. There are forums and Facebook groups, hell there are even branded t-shirts, books and coffee mugs for sale. I was simultaneously thrilled there was a whole community out there to help people feel not so alone and terrified that could possibly include me.

It didn’t feel right to lump all loss in together—people with lifetime’s full of memories didn’t feel anywhere near comparable to losing a womb mate. I was relieved, at least at first, by the discovery of several subgroups of twin grief, including womb twins and vanishing twins.

I’ve probably never closed my laptop suddenly and walked away from it saying “oh, hell no” as many times as I did over the next several hours.

I read stories of families photoshopping their surviving child into family photos a second time, but reducing the opacity on one to emulate an identical, but not quite real, version of him or her. I had pretty mixed feelings about it all. For everything that seemed outlandish—and grief can demand some pretty damn outlandish responses—there was a lot that resonated.

There were checklists and quizzes:
“I fear abandonment.”
“I am never satisfied but don’t know why.”
“I don’t let people get close to me.”
“I have been searching for something all my life but I don’t know what it is.”

Oh fuuuuck me, I remember thinking the deeper I got. But also, couldn’t anyone alive feel these things on a cellular level?

WebMD suddenly felt like the farm team to this.

“A twin remains a twin throughout life and maintains some perceptions and attitudes from this determinant experience,” one article said about these so-called womb twins. “Knowing this will enable you to understand yourself better, and to discriminate which piece of the puzzle belongs to where.”

Oh. My. God.

OKAY! That’s enough. (It wasn’t enough. I obviously kept going.)

I figured if nothing else, even if these things were the most ubiquitous of human experiences and emotions, it couldn’t hurt to at least be aware of them. (Right?)

I gave myself permission to google more than write that week—although I did a significant amount of the latter as well—finally realizing no one but me was keeping a tally. If I wasn’t going to give it to myself, who else did I expect would?

On Valentine’s Day, with “the twin thing” fully flushed from my system and Matt safely in Miami, I headed home before heading to the airport for Amsterdam.

Unpacking and repacking, both my life and suitcases, had become second nature by that point.