Us

by Nebride

A/N: Small mindless ramblings in the form of letters from a twin, trying to make sense of her loss.

oOoOo

Dear Brother,

How strange. All my life I've wanted to talk to you and now, now that I've decided to take that step, I don't know what to say.

I guess I'll start by saying, I miss you. I miss you every day, every night, every time I draw breath. I miss you with every beat of my heart.

I wish you were here. I wish I had known you.

I remember so little about you, yet what I do remember is knife-edged in its clarity, perfect in its detail. It is a frozen moment of the time that was "us".

Do you remember it, brother? Do you remember when we touched our foreheads together? Your right temple rubbing against my left? Our hands touched and clung. But they weren't really hands yet, were they? Just the primordial appendages that would one day be our hands.

Or mine, rather.

I suppose we touched many times when we were "womb mates". I suppose my memory is of many occasions, but I remember it as only one. One that is so precious to me that it has kept me awake at night, has invaded my dreams when I did sleep and comes upon me at the strangest times during the day.

You were so soft. There were no hard or angled edges when our temples rubbed against each other. Just two little soft heads of two tiny lives that had barely begun.

What do you suppose happened? I've read all the theories about Vanishing Twin Syndrome, about how risky twin births are and how the body often chooses to abort one of the fetuses.

Abort one. You. My brother. My soul. My other half. You were taken. Taken where I can not follow, where you can not reach out to me, not with tiny unformed hands, not with long strong adult fingers, but gone, taken, vanished. God, how I miss you.