Dust in the Wind

“Tell me more” Kathryn says while I sit on the chair across from her, arms squeezed tightly around my sides. I’ve been looking around the room, dodging her gaze for the thirty minutes we’ve sat with the expectant silence.

“She was there. And then she wasn’t” I mumbled. I thought that I would feel more. I had lost myself, after all. I scan the chipped, lilac paint, hanging on the wall. I imagine Star sitting in the waiting room behind the paint watching Kathryn, watching me. I center my attention back to Kathryn, focusing my gaze on her when her voice was so blurred a few seconds ago.

“Ophelia, there is something going on in that brain of yours. I can see it in your eyes. I can see you’re hurt, but more than that, I see that you are lost.”

Of course, she can see my loss. Everyone can.

“Well, yes. I miss her. She’s my twin. She is me, and I am her.”

“Was” Kathryn corrects, tilting her head down in disappointment. Her glasses slide a smidge down the bridge of her nose as she records my “miswording”. She looks at me with that familiar confused and pained gaze; The kind of look Mom and Dad show when I admit I haven’t cried yet.

“Right.”

The timer on her phone screams, and it’s the same as it always is. We hug, and I’m dismissed. 45 minutes of useless conversation—45 minutes of Hell. When I walk through the tall, lean doorframe, I see her again in the corner of my eye. I never turn to acknowledge her, but I feel the pain I know she felt when she was on her deathbed. I feel the sadness suffocating my heart when I see her flaming hair pool down her shoulders, and her feet tilted slightly inwards. I feel the weight of her existence—heavy, heavy like her shell when she left.

It was only Wednesday when she passed, yet I feel like we lost her many years before. In a way, we did when the cancer took its first bite at her brain. I remember meeting with her every day after school, sitting on the knitted blanket Mother took so much time and care to make, even though it had several holes resting in the yarn. “Nothing is perfect, Star” she’d say to her before gifting her the blanket, “So this won’t be either.” Mother always prepares her gifts with self-deprecating statements.

When I reach the front desk, I instinctively dodge the receptionist’s eyes. It’s as if he knows how pathetically numb I am. I smile, drawing my lips upward, and pull back my shoulders to match his posture. I take out the regular $80 and swivel on my heels to face the entrance. As soon as my eyes meet the door, I pull the strings threading my lips upwards into a fake smile, and feel the pressure-like sadness on my chest return.

I rest my palm on the chilled glass and see my reflection smeared over with fingerprints of therapy clients who’ve suffered before me. I don’t know her, my reflection. I used to, but it’s been awhile since we’ve last talked. I close my eyelids when I feel a familiar breath on my ear. The lucid words settle in my ear and join the phrases that have sung there before. I feel her slim fingers wrap around my heart, and her acrylic nails bite into the pumping muscle. She washes her hands with my blood and dries them with my tissue.

“Ophelia.”

I open my eyes and see it has begun to rain. Drops of water wash away the fingerprints, and I can see through the glass again.

I see a reflected smile and I avert my hazel eyes from the stranger in the door while stepping out into the storm.

I didn’t bring an umbrella.

I should’ve brought an umbrella.

I can hear my mother’s irritated voice ruminate under my skin, scratching through the pores in my face. “A forgetful girl won’t get far in life, Ophelia, dear” she’d say after comparing her disappointment of a daughter to the embodiment of perfection. “Star” she’d say with jewels in her eyes, “Won’t you teach your sister a few things?”

I place my hands over my head, as if my palms serve as well as an umbrella would. My Converse squelch through the mud like they have after many sessions before. It always seems to rain when I visit Kathryn. I look above towards the plush blankets of cloud tucking in the sun and hiding the burning ball of fire as I continue down the muddy path towards the gravel supporting my car’s wheels. I feel in my leather coat’s pocket the sharp edge of my car key and wish for a moment it would cut my finger. That it would draw blood just to reassure the soul in this empty body of mine that I’m still living—that when Star dissipated into a jar of ashes that I didn’t leave this unforgiving Earth with her. I blink away the tears that start to coat my fragile contacts and place the key into my crimson 1985 SAAB.

I feel a wind scratch at my shins before I can open the car’s ancient handle and see her again in the reflection of the driver’s side mirror. She’s there, forcing me to stare at her, forcing me to look her dead in the eye. Her feet sit on top of the “OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR” logo while her baby blue hospital gown is a push over, letting the wind almost take off with the gown. She’s not doing anything. Why isn’t she doing anything? I look to myself in the mirror and wonder why my brain wants to torture me like this, why my body is trying to force me six feet under too.

She turns around, and I watch her reflection slowly walk over the hill towards the metallic buildings, almost tall enough to tickle the clouds. My eyes follow her, almost tricking me into thinking I am her.

I must have watched her walk down the gravel hill for at least fifteen minutes because when I finally have the strength to pull my eyes away, I’m at a crosswalk and she’s on the opposite side. She’s waiting for me.

I step down off the slightly elevated concrete sidewalk and onto the horizontal white lines that are perfectly aligned like the yellow brick road leading Dorothy to the Wizard of Oz.

Star was Dorothy for Halloween one year. I think we were seven. I desperately wanted to be Dorothy, but Mother said my hair wasn’t quite the correct color to “make the costume perfect.” “Never mind wigs” I wanted to say, but by then I knew it was no use. Mother knows what she wants, and she gets it. I was the Wizard instead. I had a curtain to cover my face, and when we arrived at each house, Star would pull back the curtain to reveal that it was me, each house owner slapping his or her knee with laughter. I laughed because I knew it made her happy, but when we got home, I stuffed the curtain in the back of my dresser’s bottom drawer, promising myself I would never be embarrassed like that again.

What feels like the entire night replaying in my head is seconds in reality when I notice cars small and large aggressively honking and speeding in front of me while I stand here like an imbecile trying to kill herself. I want to move my feet, I really do, but watching the cars move past me is so soothing. Blue, gold, red, new, old, used. Cars. I close my eyes and listen to each engine rumble, each challenging honk and begin to wonder why I didn’t get in my car earlier.

My eyes flutter open when I remember I’ve been standing in the middle of the crosswalk, and the cars are yelling at me. My foot takes a step forward. Then another. Then another. My eyes have strings attached to the tips of my shoes, pulling me along the road like a puppet. I can’t move my eyes away.

My feet finally come to a halt and my muscles let my head look up as a navy-blue sedan barrels over the sidewalk, its nose pointed towards me.

I’d run, but I don’t want to anymore.

My foot takes one more step towards my fate on wheels when 10 bony fingers wrap the back of my shirt in its grasp and drag me backwards. They feel familiar, the hand. I feel the rough tips of its fingers graze my neck, the chill it spreads across my back. I know who they are, I do. Of course, I do. Why do I know them?

I’d look back, but I don’t want to anymore.

I’ve sunken down now, closer to the concrete on the side of the cross walk I’ve already been. A warm, familiar voice whispers in my ear, “Not yet.” The hand releases the back of my shirt, and now I can look around again, the sun’s rays lifting me back onto my feet. Why didn’t they let me go to the other side? Why ‘Not yet’?

I whip my neck from side to side, the specs of gold in my hair sticking to my face as I look to the brick and stone buildings for her emerald eyes to be sparkling somewhere behind a window. Tears blanket my eyes as I search for her voice singing another song she learned at church last Sunday, echoing in a dingy alley-way. Finally, at the end of the alley I see her. The sun rises on a scene, a flashback, of our childhood.

She looks young, nine at the oldest, holding a yellow balloon and twisting her body around to the music of the speakers properly positioned on each light pole. She’s wearing a light blue polka-dot dress with black Mary Jane flats. I loved that dress. She must’ve gotten to wear it today. My feet follow every step she takes, and when we take a right after the alley, a vibrant circus stands. How can this be? A circus now abandoned, is rejuvenated before my eyes. Games for all ages are aligned next to each other, sheltered by striped tents: ping pong, shoot the horse, pin the nose on the clown; everything is how I remember it to be. It’s not until young Star reaches the house of mirrors that I notice how dark it is. I look up to the sky, only a full moon in sight to guide us on the rocky path.

I ignore my heart and my head and decide to follow my feet instead. They lead me to her, into the house of mirrors. One would think someone would put at least a candle here and there for some lighting, but there is only a red, ominous glow tracing the floorboards. I must’ve gotten distracted, because there is no more Star to be seen. I can feel the anxious thoughts stream into my head faster than they can leave. They’re forced down my throat and into my chest, substituting the blood pulsing through my heart. My throat grows numb, and I no longer feel alive. I’m breathing, I am. I’m breathing. I’m breathing, I know I am, I repeat in my head, turning the words over again and again. I close my eyes and wait for the numbness in my throat to subside before I continue down the maze of mirrors.

I begin slowly, feeling each inch of my foot touch and leave the floor as I begin the path towards Star. I know she’s in here. I saw her. She’s here. She’s here. She’s here. I don’t stare into any of the mirrors, afraid of what I might see in the reflected shards of glass glaring back at me.

I never did like mirrors.

I bump into several mirrors, almost shattering some, but I continue as I stare at my black and white converse shoes, hoping that I can find my way without lifting my head. The ground changes from the wooden planks roughly placed below my feet to a rocky ground, similar to the entrance. I made it. I can’t stop my lips from grinning until I float my eyes up and stare at a copy of myself, pasted into a disfigured slab of glass, propped up against a wall in front of me. I look above the curved, neon yellow frame to a sign with chunky letters: “Fun House” it says. Fun.

I hear a low chuckle echo from the mirror and look back down to see Star, staring me in the eye. I sometimes forget how similar we are. She has such a strong and beautiful smile, one that could break dawn with the shine in her teeth and cloud the sun with the shape of her lips. I smile back at her when she grins at me, and I step closer and place my hand on the mirror to be close to her again.

“Hi, Star” I whisper and she cracks a smile, and I do too. I see her freckles, so unique and graceful like a ballerina did pointe in honey and bourréed from cheek to cheek, delicately remembering to dance across the bridge of her nose as well.

I close my eyes and lean my forehead against the chilly glass, hoping I can stay here with her forever. I let my heart slow as I lift my head up and look back at the glass to see it’s only me. My smile fades as I see her again. Star, but in her baby blue gown with her hair drawn below her shoulders, and her knees angled towards one another. She’s staring at me. She’s walking towards me. I look at her through the reflection as she steps closer to me, each time she places her foot on the ground, there being some intention behind it, an intention I can’t quite understand. My nose stings when my vision becomes distorted from the salty water gathering in my eyes. My bottom lip begins to quiver ever so slightly, but enough that I feel I have to place my hand on my mouth to make it stop.

She’s getting closer.

Something about this Star isn’t right, something I didn’t see before. I wanted to follow her before, understand her. Yet, now that I see her here, looking at me, moving towards me, something pumping in my veins tells me to—

“Run” I hear myself say for no reason at all but to make my feet move. And move they do. I take one last look at her before she reaches out her hand and I see her bottom lip quiver too. I dart left and lift up each of my legs, one at a time, hearing the rocks crack under my shoes.

I’d look back, but I can’t.

I don’t know where I’m going, but I know that wherever my feet take me, I’ll follow. My peripheral vision fades into a blur on each side, and the only thing I can see now is my crimson 1985 SAAB parked next to Kathryn’s therapy building. I’ll be safe soon.

It feels as if the car is pulled towards me, like my legs aren’t even moving. I pull out the ridged key from my black jacket pocket, place it in the lock, turn the key, frantically sling open the door, step inside and sit down, slam the door, and start the engine all in the span of about five seconds. I don’t bother putting on a seatbelt as I put the gear in drive and head towards the nearest road.

When I get on the main road, I look to my car’s clock to see it’s only 3:17 pm. I look up to the sky and am reassured by the gloating sun. I wipe off my forehead from the raindrops that poured before and turn on the radio. I skip past Today’s Hits until a song I’ve never cared to listen to before begins playing. The cymbals and drums strike me in the beginning, almost causing me to lose my grip on the steering wheel. The tone changes to a piano melody with an upbeat sound and melancholy lyrics.

My blood is running normally now, and my heartbeat has slowed. I might even make it home for dinner.

I smile at the thought of me walking through the front door to see Dad with the morning newspaper in hand, him finally having a chance to read it, and Mother working on her flowers for the Spring. I close the light blue door behind me and sit down at the dinner table, and the same conversation conspires. “Hello, Ophelia, Dear.” “How was your day, dear?” “Would you like some chicken, dear?”

My daydream has clouded my vision, the clouds just now clearing from my eyesight in time for me to see it.

“Deer!” I screech as the innocent thing scurries in front of my car at the wrong time. My hands go numb like my throat a few hours before and time feels as if it’s stuck in a cube of ice. I see a hand almost identical to mine reach over my right arm and grasp the wheel, yanking it to the side. In the split second I have, I look to my right and see her sitting in her baby blue gown next to me with her hands on my wheel.

Star.

I’ve never seen blackness like this before. This darkness, it’s artificial. Almost perfectly man-made, yet too ethereal.

I’d open my eyes, but I don’t want to yet.