Page 14 of My Heart Before You

“Okay.” Emilie glanced at the time on her alarm clock, rushing to reach her dresser before stopping. “I love you.”

Emotion crept into her sister’s voice. “I love you too.”

“An, I’m fine,” she reassured her sister, “but I’m gonna be late.”

“Sure, talk to you later,” she said.

“Talk to you later, bye.”

“Bye.”

???

Emilie knocked on the door’s fogged glass window with two minutes to spare. At “Come in,” she twisted the cold brass handle and let herself into her new therapist’s office.

The musty smell that accompanied old buildings compounded as she stepped into the room. Nia was sitting behind her large wooden desk in the center room, the space around her computer riddled with folders and papers as usual. She rose and gestured to choose one of the floral wingback chairs set against the wall covered in her many degrees and accolades.

“Good morning.” Emilie leaned her gear bag and purse against the legs of the chair angled toward the window and sat.

The sun streamed through the large pane window and brightened the otherwise dim space.

“Mornin’. What’s been going on? How have you been?” Nia’s brown eyes, a few shades darker than her skin, looked up from beyond her coarse grey curls, which bounced in uneven lines over her red blouse.

Their conversations always started this way, allowing Emilie to steer the dialogue from the start. “I’ve been good. I talked to Analie this morning.”

Nia took up a notepad from the mahogany tea table between them. “How often do you talk to your family now?”

“Usually daily—at least to one of them. We text when I’m at work and talk when I’m home.”

Nia nodded. “How’s your relationship with your sister?”

“Good. We’re essentially back to what it was before.” She’d signed all the releases for her therapist back home to submit notes to Nia, so she didn’t need to rehash everything that happened.

“Tell me how it was before.”

A deep breath filled her lungs. “Like most identical twins, we were inseparable. We had different personalities and ways of approaching our goals, but largely we hit life milestones at the same time. It was nice. We always had a person to bounce ideas off who was experiencing the same thing at the same time. We were more than sisters, we were best friends. Then . . .”

The leaves outside the window rustled in the breeze, and a slight hum sounded from a crack in the pane where rivulets of air snuck through. She let herself be distracted by the subtle murmur in the otherwise quiet office.

“That’s what they don’t tell you. They don’t tell you that initially everyone’s concerned for you and focused on you, but then life goes on. Things go back to normal for them, they get on with their lives, the calendar ticks away, but you don’t change. Everyone else marches on but you’re stuck. It’s like living in a parallel universe where time is frozen only for you. You want to scream out, but you’re too trapped to even do that. You try going through the motions, but you know in your core that nothing’s ever going to be the same.

“I knew it wasn’t her fault, but I just couldn’t watch her move on with her life when I was frozen in mine. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing yourself and the life you had, and then realizing it was an illusion. I couldn’t look at her for the longest time. I couldn’t be around her. I was so angry. We were supposed to move through life together, and she got to move forward and I got stopped.”

Nia sat in perfect poised silence, as if a statue of a living person instead of one breathing the same air in the room as her.

“After . . . when I was living at my parent’s house, they brought a therapist in to help me cope. For us all to talk. I didn’t want to talk to her or anyone. They wouldn’t give up on me though, and eventually I started working through everything. I started having a relationship with my parents again, and after a long time, I started talking to Analie. The night she came over for dinner . . .” The tightness in her spine intensified as shame ran down it. “. . . it’d been almost a year since I’d seen her.”

She remembered how hollowed her sister’s eyes were, equally sorrowful and apprehensive, like she was afraid Emilie would run across the room and attack her. But it was the shock of her sister so changed that knocked the wind out of her.

“She’d cut her hair so short and highlighted it to look more blonde than brunette. We always had matching long hair and never dyed it.” She aimlessly fingered the end of her braid. “I realized instantly it was for me. She’d changed the way she looked after thirty-one years of looking the same way, so I wouldn’t be looking into a mirror when I saw her. It wasn’t until then that I saw all the pain I’d caused my sister . . . my best friend.”

She remembered the sheared edges of Analie’s hair brushing her cheek as Emilie hugged her, whispering apologies. Her sister simply cried, told her it was okay, and that she loved her.

Quiet resonated in the room for a few moments. The warmth on her face registered before she realized that she was crying. Nia broke her repose and leaned forward gently, holding out a tissue box.

She lifted the soft paper to her eyes. “That was the first day I understood that I wasn’t the only one who was hurting. While I was bent on my own self-destruction, I caused those who loved me the most pain.”

Her annihilation of their relationship and how she refused to see or speak to her sister for so long pushed at her ribs, squeezing all the oxygen from them. She took a quick gasp to reassure herself her lungs still worked, and reminded herself she’d just bickered lovingly with Analie this morning.

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