Dust lay thick on the furniture. Spots of sun leaked through the worn curtains. Somewhere, a rodent skittered away on clawed feet. Kayla stood in the middle of the living room and sighed. She wasn’t sure why she had come. She had given so many years to this place, to the waiting. It hadn’t given back, yet she couldn’t help but feel guilty for having abandoned it.
Kayla stepped around the couch and into the kitchen. Her breath caught in her throat as her hand grabbed toward the nearest wall. She swayed on the spot, fighting against what her eyes saw but her brain refused to believe. Standing beside the antique stove was her sister. Her twin sister. Gone was the unsure teenager who Kayla remembered. In her place stood a confident woman with beaded dreadlocks gathered atop her head and a hand resting easy on a solid fighting staff. The strangeness was still there. That haunting way she tilted her head as if listening to something a million miles away. The way her eyes looked glossed over yet swam with swirling clouds. And the voice, as if speaking from another place:
“Kayla. I have been waiting for you.”
Kayla didn’t know if she should laugh or cry or scream.
“Waiting for me? You’ve been waiting for me?” She shook her head. “I waited for you. For six years, Ruta, I waited.”
Ruta closed her eyes and lifted her chin, catching a breeze that wasn’t there. No, that wasn’t here. How easy it was to watch her sister drift between two worlds and feel that anger rise again, anger at not being given the same gifts as her twin.
Anger at being normal.
Kayla thought she had moved past all of that, but this shock and storm of emotions thrust her back into childhood. She knew how hard it had been on Ruta -she had watched her sister struggle with even the most mundane of tasks- and still Kayla had wanted to be the one that was different.
Ruta came back to the room. Her eyes focused on Kayla. Ruta didn’t look like she struggled with things anymore. Ruta didn’t look like someone who saw her gifts as a disability anymore.
“Why did you stop waiting?”
It wasn’t an accusation; just curiosity. Kayla let her body slide down the wall. Her eyes stared at nothing.
“I lost hope. I started to believe mom was right. You had to be dead.”
“I was dead. I will be dead again. We are all trapped in the cycle of life and death. Living is just unbecoming and reconstructing. Death and rebirth. You die too. We all do.”
Kayla looked long and hard at her twin. Ruta was right. Kayla could not find even a spark of the teenage rebel she had once been: a young girl willing to take any risk just to be different, to feel different. That girl had died.
Kayla could feel herself dying again. A cycle of unbecoming and becoming again.
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