I

“The snow geese have arrived!” your friend writes, and the picture she sends shines with blue light, wavers with the smudge of wing. A tousle of birds blurs above thin snow and the stipple of last year’s grass. Something about the way she writes arrived makes me want to celebrate. Living confetti fills the air, and everything about the scene is effervescent: the swarm of geese, the melting snow, the coming of something good. Arrival, though, denotes conclusion, a setting down of loads, and I pause long enough to mistrust it.

A snow goose might spend more than half of every year migrating. This is not to say that they are inefficient: a rare and exceptionally streamlined goose, propelled by swift drafts and winging sky-high above the flat land, might travel over a thousand miles in a day. Mostly though, a goose takes its time, stops to nibble at sedges, batters backward in storm fronts, starts moving when it feels necessary. To arrive in a place means, also, already to be considering liftoff—maybe after a good snack.

The picture of the snow geese could be anywhere in the northern places that I know: shorn field, winter light. Some of the birds are white (“snows”) and some have dark flashes on their bodies (“blues”), and together the different colors of snow geese are sometimes simply called “light geese.” I imagine the qualities of light that they pass through on their migration. The low-angle arctic sun. Pennsylvania’s cold February glow, the gold of Texas, hazy brilliance at the Mexican border. The birds move like changing light, lightweight, alighting impermanently.

And still, I consider how you and I both chose to show up here. I think of the things we carried when we came: a white cardboard box full of your father’s words; a necklace from my dad in the shape of a tiny Inuit girl, dancing; a brimming emptiness that we carried into our respective showers, where salt water could dissolve into fresh. And I consider how it has been found that geese who travel together are able to travel seventy-five to eighty percent farther than a single goose flapping alone. The leading goose in a formation cuts a slipstream for the following geese to pass through and in turn, the geese behind help to push the forward geese with upward drafts from their pumping wings. When one goose falters, or narrowly escapes the crunch of a fox’s jaws, or sickens, another goose will land with it. The companion will wait for the goose to fly again, won’t leave the broken one behind.

Airborne, they honk, and maybe they’re simply avoiding collision, maybe the strain of movement pulls that sound from their thick and snowy chests. Long skeins of them unfold over the landscape and their collective crying pulls the watcher, spellbound, to her feet.

On the corner of the street—you dressed in a velvet blazer, I threadbare from a long phone conversation with my mother—we call out to each other:

Caw-caw!

The pink bill of the snow goose is tinged black where the two mandibles meet, giving them a black “grin patch.” Those black seams are everything but jovial. Sharp cutting edges can snap through twigs and tubers like garden shears.

Windows down, we pile into your ride and cruise Tucson on our way south to a reading. I ain’t fuckin’ with no off-brand bitches, yeah, EMI broadcasts over the speakers. The night air is warm even in February and the shadows along the sides of the street, like the shadows of birds, are swift and blurred. We will be arriving soon.

||

Someone I know has taken a photo of snow geese. I send you the photo as a form of communication, as a way of being in the same space without speaking, as a way of forcing our entwinement further. We continue sending photos, but the snow geese are the first. The birds vibrate in the image, pulsing towards the photo’s edge. I imagine they are moving south from rural New York, moving South, just as we did this year, abandoning snow and more snow for winters of eighty degrees. In the photo, the birds’ bodies look blue from the reflection of the sky and the reflection of the snow, which is melting into the brown ground. Their wings are singed black, as though dipped in ash. This year, wildfires raged in Sonoma county, near your home. The flames charred the land and razed downtown, leaving emptiness in its wake, and for a week, you flipped open calls from your mother, ducking away from me at lunches, on walks, and in bars to listen for the news that your home was gone.

It was the build-up to loss that you felt, the wind-up for something that never came. The firefighters dug a ditch, the flames feet from your house, from your living room and bedroom and kitchen, but the fire couldn’t reach the place where you learned to tie your shoes. We joke that when something happens to one of us, it will happen to the other. I’m glad that you never learned the aftermath of smoke, but I know that I never experienced the anticipation that you did, the fear prior to loss.

In the process of moving to my desert home, a mirror broke, shattered, reflective shards opening up on the floor of the moving van. Our stories broke in different ways, but they fit together, too. There are missing shards, gaps between pieces, and we remember that mirror images are not exact copies. When you move left, I move right; still, we both move.

Years ago, my house burned to its foundations, suddenly, unexpectedly. My mother went on a bike ride and came back to a house on fire. She saved the dog and called my father. “I’ll bring the marshmallows,” he said. At the time, she didn’t find it funny. I was in kindergarten and she picked me up mid-way through school. As we drove towards home, she told me it was no longer there. Have I told you this? My memories of that gone house are mostly false, built from photos I’ve seen of the galley kitchen and pecan trees in the backyard. In one picture, I’m wearing a pink nightgown and clear goggles, sitting on the Formica kitchen counter with a metal pick, and chipping away at a fake dinosaur egg. Not all my fabricated memories are crafted from images. There’s the odd memory built from narrative, too, from tales my mother told me about how I lost my tooth in the backyard and spent hours attempting to recover it.

But it strikes me that we are always attempting to recover a loss, looking for that missing home, except in digging in, we fail to land. We keep moving, searching for that true moment, the scrap of purple tulle stuck beneath my window and a note from the tooth fairy saying she found my dirt-covered tooth amidst the grass in the backyard.

We look to other stories to make sense of our own, to try to chart our narratives past and future. Daedalus and Icarus, father and child, wax and feathers, wings and sea. The myth is an easy allusion for two English majors to reach for. Still: your father drowned in the ocean. My father’s ashes live there, too. It’s a doomed narrative to claim for ourselves, and yet we’ll keep moving until our wings fall off. Like the birds in the photo, like the wet ground in the picture, like the photographer herself, we keep moving. I move left and you move right. I look at the photo and realize we are moved by each other.

II

Gull and Mole went down to the beach one day. Mole spent most of her time below ground, but she found her way into the open that day—perhaps to snuffle for marine worms in the low pools left behind by the outgoing tide, perhaps to pad about on the green mats of seaweed on quick flat paws, to collect salt spray in beads along her silken whiskers.

Mole could not see very well, and she had ears that were only barely visible against the streamlined curve of her skull. She had a pink patch at the tip of her face, the exposed skin of which could feel movement and touch. She used this patch—prickling with nerve endings, with sensory information—to navigate a world of dirt and risk.

Gull was hungry, and Mole probably was, too, but Gull moved more quickly than Mole. Gull lifted Mole by her hind quarters, so that Mole swung in the salt air, paws spread wide, face toward the wide sky. Python-like, gull swallowed her whole.

Mole was not comfortable with this negotiation and sought to change her circumstances. I do not know if her movements were quick or slow—I only have the three still images, sent to me by a man whom I used to kiss until he asked too much from me. In one picture, the front half of Mole’s body gleams in bright light, emerging from the neck of the gull. Her broad claws can’t be seen in the snapshot—the claws that burrowed through esophagus and gristle instead of soil, the claws surely streaked with the same dark blood that shadows the gull’s feathers like spilled ink.

In another image, the bones of the two animals appear in the transparent shine of an x-ray: rib, spinal cord, beak, claw. The two are attached, tiny rib cage rising from rib cage, claws extended outward like scoops, wing bones bent in immortalized exertion.

I watch you do the things that I do, too. You pull yourself out of the dark loam of your sadness, you humor the men who hip-hop close with hunger written cleanly on their bodies. You wait for one of them to see you—not as eater to eaten but simply, I imagine, as animal to animal.

You drive north with one, through the cactus-stubbled flatlands and into a bigger city than ours. He tells you so many things. He speaks about his heart and his fears and doesn’t ask you about yours, assumes that you want what he wants—assumes, later, that you want what he’s scared to give, assumes a lot. You listen. He knows that you have been hurt before, and you leave it at that, and he doesn’t ask about it, and in the quiet that follows I imagine that you track the movement of passing car lights along the ceiling. Your naked arms are woven together on the air mattress, rib nestled close to rib.

The word "relationship" first appeared in written form in 1744, but only in the last seventy years or so has it come to denote a romantic or sexual partnership. Intercourse once simply meant “communications between individuals.” Having come first in language, are these the building blocks for romance—alliance, equal weight shared, words spoken, words heard? Or are they the things we now sacrifice when we strip down in front of another human, one meaning making room for a new and more efficient one?

I think of the bird with its mouth full of warm, fat mole. I think of the confident pluck and swallow, the self-assured satiation. Meal accomplished. Hunger fulfilled. I think, too of the mole:

DID YOU REALLY JUST EAT ME, MOTHERFUCKER?

Can you feel it, too? The suffocation? That close inward press of muscle and expectation and sea-smelling heat?

Mole understood dark places. She leaned into the task she knew best. She cut her claws through the sticky weight, pushed toward the gulp of clean air. She would not be consumed.

||

How do we begin at the end? I remember chasing sea gulls at the beach where a decade later my family would scatter my dad’s ashes. There was a bend in the sand that I called sea gull island. The birds packed together under the sun, occasionally squawking, or shaking out a wing. I watched, for a moment, then ran at them with abandon, the golden sand sticking to my feet, the hot sun beaming down, the wind brushing my hair from my eyes. The birds fluttered up and open, a vortex of feathers scattering above my head before landing a few feet away. I chased these birds for hours in my pink baseball hat and plastic sunglasses before tiring and returning to my dad, who slung me onto his slightly sunburned shoulders and carried me home.

It’s impossible to trace this narrative back without remembering how it ends. You send me a triptych of photos, and in the first, we watch the white gull swoop the mole from the red-brown rock-bed with the seemingly infinite ocean behind him. Yet, superimposed to this triumph are pale feathers matted with blood. In the next photo, the gull is dead. The mole is dead from clawing out from within. The third is an X-ray image of this narrative. I’m trying to resist the urge to insert us where we don’t belong, but I can’t help it if I see mirrors in every story.

“My dad died, too,” you said. You spoke quietly, as an aside, as something outside the frame, as a comment written in the margins of a conversation. This was the first time we realized our twinned and twined lives. You remember, like me, when your life cracked open.

Our stories are fraternal, dizygotic, as in two eggs, as in two separate but simultaneous conceptions. Or perhaps they are identical, as even identical twins lead different lives. What’s true is that we are both one and two. I wonder how often we are we rather than you and I. I thought about this one night as we sat in the desert. You attempted to chart the sky, drawing invisible figures into the night with your fingers. Escape to the desert and look at the night: it’s something we do more often than not. It’s a way to escape the world created for us, a way to move into another dimension, to move outside our stories, into a new narrative. There aren’t other people, just us, the blue velvet sky, the cameo carvings of saguaros, and our stories. The moon moves imperceptibly and we pretend we’re outside of time. It’s our version of a room of one’s own.

On that night, we looked for zodiac signs, for signposts that tell us how to move through our lives. This month, your horoscope warned you that “loving deeply means risking loss.” Mine told me “home is a state of trusting that you are loved.” Together we learn to trust the loss in love. In the sky, we couldn’t find Scorpios or Cancers, our signs, but we found what we thought was the Gemini constellation, a pair of twins laid into the stars. Castor and Pollux, both born of Leda, but twins with different fathers. The King of Sparta fathered Castor, while Zeus transfigured into a swan to rape Leda and conceive Pollux. Same mother, different fathers. One twin immortal, the other mortal. The pair is caught between the flow of time and the amber of eternity. When Castor died, Pollux asked to share his immortality. They lay together in the stars.

Six years ago, I was in the hospital, holding my dad’s cold hand. He couldn’t hold mine back. His body was more bone than meat, skin hanging from his shoulders. His breath kept catching on his teeth, and it was quiet except for his breathing. Then, it was simply quiet. My mother let out a broken “No.” I held his hand because I didn’t want him to be alone. I held his hand because I didn’t want to be alone.

III

A note on immortality: in old centuries, mermaids were patched together for curiosity cabinets, fin tacked to monkey body; narwhal tusks were marketed as unicorn horns. The catch is, no one really knew what a unicorn should look like—or for that matter, any of the other strange animals shipped in from far-off longitudes. A lion hide stitched together in 18th-century Sweden wears a flat-toothed grin, wide eyes rolling jovially in its skull. The first wombat to arrive in England was molded into the posture of a British squirrel. The 19th-century taxidermist who received a walrus skin was not aware that the marine mammal that wore it was wrinkled and baggy. So the skin was stuffed until it was smooth. The bloated specimen is still on view at London’s Horniman Museum. For awhile, a sign at an exhibit at the Grant Museum of Zoology reads “Platypus, Flatypus, Platysausage.” Behind the glass, two specimens from the same species sit side by side: one, round and furry, plumped at the throat, the belly, the back; the other, flat and svelte enough to slide under a gappy door.

Taxidermy translates to the “arrangement of skin.” The things that fill us—stuffing, violences, plaster, heartbreak, hunger, sculpted wire—determine the contours of our skin, the shapes of our selves.

The two suspended dead horses in the picture you send me are similar: velvet-furred and brown and cleanly-proportioned (neither flatypus nor platysausage). Each seems held in orbit by the other’s gravity; each is taut against the air space between them, like magnets with matching poles, sizzling with commonality and repulsion.

Castor and Pollux—the Gemini twins—stand side by side in the sky, space buzzing between the stars. Astrologers recognize Gemini personalities as volatile—a person born under those stars might be sociable in one moment, restless in the next. Twinning, then, denotes not just alikeness but gappiness, difference.

You shy away from touch; I move too eagerly toward it and panic when anyone holds on. Together, we curl close to each other on your couch. We trace and retrace the unseeable places on our bodies where we hurt. Above us, the celestial twins hold space for one another, too.

Real unicorns walked the earth alongside humans as recently as 29,000 years ago, according to a recent study in American Journal of Applied Science. Of course, they looked nothing like we would have expected them to: the bones tell us that they were stocky, husky, thick with shag, that their horns were dense and dark. We can imagine skin overlaid atop bone, a full animal unlike our expectation, and the idea disappoints, repels, forces us to stand in new parallax to their bodies; to our own.

The arrangement of skin is a tricky science. What ownership does an animal have over the way it is filled, the way it is stretched? How can a hide tell the story of the losses that bent it? What whimsy steers the shaping of another’s skin; what expectations steer how we choose to arrange it? What ecologies emerge from the rigid display of body next to body next to body?

“Derma,” skin; “axis,” to move. In our migratoriness, we lean into each other like the horses, snout turned upward toward snout, hoof nestled downward toward neighboring flank. We touch the invisible scars on one another’s skin, we consider the resonances between our griefs, we lean into our shared orbit knowing that orbits only ever widen.

And when I consider our own bodies, I think less of skin and of filling, although the same sorts of hungers fill us both. I think, instead, of relationship: belly to belly, neck turned toward neck. How, at the end of our animal days, might we be memorialized—plumped tightly or legs rearranged? How—other than close to each other but not the same, held in suspension, two bodies?

||

The horses lie one above the other, supported by rough barn wood nailed into easels. The space between them seems insurmountable. Their bodies are unmoving, their brown bristle-haired skin sewn together where hooves should be, where eyes should be, where a mouth should be. Their bodies are all skin, no being.

Skin is our body’s first layer of protection. We’re swaddled in epidermis, interlocking cells meant to keep the outside from coming in. It’s thick in some parts, like the heels, and thin in others, like the eyelids. As the top cells flake off, new cells are born beneath. Consider where we are most sensitive to touch: palms, fingertips, the arch of the foot, the tip of the eyelid. These centers are packed with mechanoreceptors, with Merkel’s disks and Meissner’s corpuscles. Together, these touch receptors tell you when you’re being touched and for how long.

It sometimes feels as though I’m performing my own story. Watch me pop open the sutures of tragedy. Watch me nod to “I’m sorry” for years to come: from family, from friends, at the doctor’s, in class, whenever the truth sweats out. Watch me rewind to that night in February. Watch me drink too much watermelon-flavored vodka. Watch me miss the pill dissolving in my drink like moonlight dissipating into clouds. Watch me lie naked in a foreign bed. Watch me will myself to remember. Staring at the popcorn ceiling, I told myself Remember this. In the morning, I woke to a hand skimming over my open skin, sliding over the divot from hips to breasts, over and over. Sometimes someone will touch me in that valley and I’ll recoil. The skin remembers. How silly to remind myself of what the body will never forget.

I can catalogue the nicks in my skin now. A cut on my left knuckle, a scab along my hairline, a bruise below my knee, a bruise fading in above. I’m proud of the ways I’ve thrown my body at my life. When our wounds disappear, they only move inward. I’ve spent a long time trying to knead them out.

I wonder, often, what type of architectural structure skin is. Recently, I’ve been seeing an architect who has promised to make me a bird house, one with two doors, openings on both sides. Maybe this is why I’m thinking of skin as a building feature. As an unlocked door, a locked window. Always, there is an opening, a gap. I tell you about our dates and the details of the birdhouse, yet you weren’t there when he sketched the design on a napkin at the dimly lit bar. I let in people I don’t want to; I keep out those who care for me. Once, you slept on my couch and I closed the curtains so the morning sun wouldn’t disturb you, but often I feel we play the opposite roles. You feel comfortable as protector, and I wish I believed you could protect me from everything. You try, but there is always a gap, an opening.

I remember the photo of you in a striped poncho, leaning forward, gingerly kissing the nose of a horse. I don’t remember what kind of horse it was, but you do. I don’t remember the horse’s name, but you do. I don’t remember where the photo was taken, but you do. Do you remember the care you took with the strong and fragile creature?

Neither of us slept this week. We lay awake, miles apart, thinking of the open wounds in our lives. In the morning, we walked and biked to class. We taught in separate buildings and came together for lunch, ordering from the same restaurant. “How are you?” we asked. We listened. We hugged. Our mechanoreceptors registered being held long after we left.

IV

When I met the shark, I remember a feeling of vertigo, a lightning flash of panic startling outward through my body. The shark herself was beautiful. But where I jumped into the water to see her—the rest of the passengers staying aboard the small boat, leaning over the edge to watch me plunge—the slope of seafloor dropped off into six thousand feet of blue depth. There is something about not knowing where the bottom is that shakes a body, fills it with dread. But then the shadow of the shark passed under me, and dazzle supplanted fear.

Whale sharks are the largest fish in the ocean and lead nomadic lives that researchers have failed to track accurately. When they move, their whole 20-ton bodies swing slowly from side to side. The sharks are made out of rough gray skin and geometric patches of light. These patterns so resemble the night sky that in order to better recognize individuals, biologists have begun to apply a NASA algorithm designed for identifying star patterns. It is a way of tagging without touching. A group of whale sharks is called a constellation.

You write about your father, who died in a starched hospital bed too soon and too quickly, and you write about the night sky. You think about how meteors—chipped away from larger constellations—leave a trail behind, pointing back to the bigger pattern from which they fell. You try to follow the trail. You wonder if people moving close to each other hold time within them, the way that the movements of stars themselves might constitute time. You reach for clocks and for stardust, for connective lines between celestial bodies, to earn back the shared time you lost when your father stopped breathing.

What are constellations but stories written with stars instead of words? I want to draw you a new constellation, one that sizzles between your own special Scorpio stars and the far edge of the sky, one that won’t leave you when the earth turns from summer to winter. I want to be with you, be near you—one star moving close to another. Maybe my own gravity—heavier now that I, too, carry the loss of my own father—will pull against yours, will lift some of that weight into a shared liminal space.

When I swam with the whale shark, I had to kick hard to keep up, although it moved unhurriedly, almost languidly, through the sunbeams and horrifying blue shadows cutting upward from below. All around, fishing boats chopped up froth and troubled the water with glinting propellers and wild bubbles. The shark and I were the only swimmers in a world of noise and scattered light.

Light travels more slowly underwater as, perhaps, does time. Familiar things slow down, distort, refract. My dad died underwater, in a kelp forest where maybe twenty minutes felt like five, where the space between breath and death might have felt like a quick moment to him while high overhead, the weird shapes of the above-water world moved slowly. By the time anyone thought to ask “where’s Stew?” his body was already empty, another lonely flash of light gone dark in a dark sea.

Constellations, of course, are not constant. Accelerate the movement of stars through 150,000 years, and Leo will arc into an unworkable backbend, the Southern Cross will divide out into parallel lines. Movement is inevitable. So, too, the horror of loss. Looking up at the stars, as from underwater, we reach through the distance, fingers stretching not for the suns themselves, but for the connective tissue between them, the constellation lines that stack our starbright bursts of pain into an ordered shape. Those shapes will change.

I am interested in this movement. I consider how to employ it, how—like the shark—to carry my own constellations on my skin, to let them identify me, to feel them shift and bend as I muscle my way into uncertain places. Earlier this year, I gave you a sticker with a whale shark printed on it. Can a constellation be built of just two stars?

Castor and Pollux, the twins with different fathers, are only two points in a larger constellation. Separate stars make up each of their bodies. Some have been named: Propus, Alhena, Wasat (Forward Foot, Shining, Middle of the Sky). Some are simply labeled with curt Greek letters. β. ε. ζ. In our own constellations, we too still look for the right language to label those pinpoints of hurt that are each of ours, uniquely. Some, we have yet to speak aloud to each other.

||

I put the whale shark sticker you gave me on my computer. You took a photo of one, the first photo of her, so they let you name her. These creatures are identified by their constellation of spots, and so in a way you charted a new sky within the sea. The scientific community in charge of tracking whale sharks sent you a sticker, you gave it to me, and I put it on my computer. I feel like a bad ass every time I open my laptop, as though your life refracted onto mine and projected over it.

Refraction occurs when light passes through an object of a different density. For example, water refracts light from air as its molecules are more tightly packed compared to the open sky. The light changes direction, if only slightly. It’s a bend, a scattering of light. Light is both a wave and a particle. A particle is made up of protons, electrons, and neutrons, but the farther inward and down the research rabbit-hole I travel, the more I lose track of what I am trying to see. Look at the moving mosaic at the bottom of a pool and you’ll see the process, the art of refraction. You once told me that you were a water baby, and I am trying to see the way the light arches through you and onto me.

In the photo you send me, the swimmer reaches for the whale shark, and the animal extends its fin towards the human. What does it mean when mirror images reach for each other? What does it mean to touch the surface of the water, to fall into the wet sky below? I’m asking, of course, whether two humans can ever truly touch each other. We know so much about each other’s lives, but we don’t live the other’s. Our stories are twinned but not the same. We lead fraternal lives. You busy your days when you feel tidal pull of tragedy, when your brother relapses, or you think of your father, or your mother calls to tell you what a terrible daughter you are. You hike mountains and go on bike rides and day trips and drink beer with men who like to talk about their research jobs and motorcycles and acrobatic yoga. When I hear my uncle is in jail again and my grandmother refuses to go to the hospital and my father has been dead for six years, I stay home and drink wine. We disappear from our lives in different ways, but we both disappear.

At night, once, I wore your coat and someone called out, “Hannah?” Briefly, the image of you was projected onto me. I was Hannah, a woman who took a photo of a whale shark, a woman who left an engagement when it started to fall apart, a woman who will hug her friends with a fierceness that communicates all her emotions. In that moment, I felt the wave of you crash into me. You’re protective of me in ways that I don’t allow many others to be: when I cry, you hug me, envelope me, hope to squeeze out my pain. I keep my wounds hidden from most, but I’m the same way about you, skeptical of anyone who doubts the light refracted through you. We offer protective casing to the other, but I wonder if we could be protective of ourselves the way we are about the other. We are mirrors, after all, so does it mean in loving each other we love ourselves?

Refraction comes from the Latin verb, refringere, meaning to break up. Light passing through a prism breaks apart into a rainbow. Water slipping through a pool cracks open on the bottom. Trauma passing through us fractures onto the other. Perhaps we are so close because we know what it means to be broken. Perhaps we look to the other because it allows us to see ourselves. Mirrors are not perfect reproductions, twins are not exact replicas, but in looking at the other, we see ourselves.

V

Reflect on this: when the egg split happens late for monozygotic—identical—twins, they can develop features that oppose each other. One might be right-handed and the other left-handed. The same birthmark might show up on opposite sides of each body. Hair whorls swirl in opposite directions. “Mirror image twins,” when facing each other, appear as uncanny and imperfect reflections of each other.

I think about the way our language shifts into parallel, how we don each other’s clothing and how, when you leaned back in your seat that night, I leaned forward—reflexively, reflectively—to fold you into my arms.

A mirror, though, needs a smooth surface to create a perfect reflection. Consider a ball bouncing straight back off a wall. Consider the same ball ricocheting off a rugged cliff face, veering as it strikes jagged ledges, spinning off of sharp angles. Light does this, too—bouncing more cleanly off of a microscopically polished mirror than, say, off of the rippled surface of water.

We are rippled and rugged. Neither surface is smooth, or the same.

You climb a local hill every week but grumble when a climb gets too extreme. I fall in love with mountains more often than I do with people—seeking high places and cutting paths through brush and scree where there weren’t any before. When you’re faced with the alarming possibility of going on a hiking date, I encourage you to pack a rock guide as an excuse to slow down and not lose face.

In the classroom, I get edgy when discussion shifts into concept and theory and a canon that I don’t know. You thrive—drawing on references, connecting dots.

Grasshoppers and crickets gather at your threshold and you back away from them and I move closer.

I left a dishonest engagement, watched the blood from my abortion carve a hot and widening hole in the snow. You live with the specter of unwelcome touch—a thing that lived inside of you for a long time before you could speak it aloud.

Our hauntings and hesitancies scatter our light, ripple our reflections.

When I consider mirrors, I consider distance, too, and time. Mirrors allow us to measure our distance to the moon—we know now that it is receding from Earth about an inch and a half a year. Physicists use mirrors to divert light and to speed it up as laser beams rush through mirrored tunnels. They have developed the ability to hide objects in time—“temporal cloaking.” Quite literally, they create holes in time: time travel. New mirroring technology can make temporal holes that are equal to the time it takes for the light to travel a certain distance. The longer the distance (say, to the moon and back), the larger the holes in time.

I wonder about that distance. Has time softened the contours of my grief? I let men touch me now in ways that are still frightening for you. Sometimes, I’ll ghostwrite messages in response to boys who want to go on dates with you, and in those moments, I am you and am protecting you. The time has widened between myself and my hurt. This helps me to hold you—although, to be fair, I still do not know how to hold myself.

Mirror-based time travel is possible, they say, but only into the past. In the future, our light will travel only outward, seeking new surfaces.

Later: I will stomp up a mountain somewhere, among the creatures toward whom I often reach for answers, a long way away from this desert city. You will pull chairs into a circle, assign readings about loss and appropriation, teach young writers the merits of sentimentality. Maybe we will stand too far from each other for reflection.

Now: in the woods, the mirrors, shaped like slim women, slide into unexpected clarity—hips, shoulders, breasts, curved fingers—and melt back into the forest again, all leaf and no body. They are and are not—time and stillness, object and reflection, self and world. They are motionless, I suppose. But they shimmer, side by side, with all the bend and scatter and migratory movement of mirrors.

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Two women cut from mirrors, curved into silhouettes turned toward each other. Their frozen bodies reflect the grass and trees, their elongated necks catch the light shuffling through leaves, their stomachs birth the greenery. You write often of the arterial roots and trunks of nature, but you aren’t a nature writer. “I don’t want to be pigeon-holed,” you say. A pigeonhole, physically, is a small recess for a nest, a place for someone to rest, to place themselves. A pigeonhole is a space for settling.

The pulp from the orange juice you handed me yesterday settled at the bottom of the glass. The fibrous strands sank to the base and stayed slicked down when I finished the liquid. To settle suggests a stagnancy our lives are incapable of. I sometimes wonder how the men get it so wrong, how they see us as those frozen mirrors reflecting their faces. We listen to them. We hear them work through lingering feelings for exes, we hear them work through their feeling for us, we hear them and hear them, but do they ever hear us? A pigeonhole can be an echo chamber, an emptiness to fill.

“You broke my heart into one thousand pieces,” he tells you one night when you explain you can’t be what he wants you to be. He suggests you’re looking to settle down, just with someone else. He doesn’t know if you can be just friends. You’re careful; you don’t want to hurt him, but between you and him, who knows how to be broken? He sees you as an empty space in need of someone to home. Someone should rest there, it’s such a nice nook for a nest, he thinks. He doesn’t realize that some gaps aren’t meant to be filled, that some gaps can’t be filled.

“I don’t want to be pigeon-holed,” you say, and I’m shocked that anyone could make that mistake. You aren’t an open hole in a tree or a mirror stuck into the ground. You’re not even the swaying grass. You’re the goddamn pigeon cutting through the sky, threading your life from one nook to the next.

Carrier pigeons are excellent listeners, navigating by sounds at one-tenth of a hertz while humans, even under the best conditions, can only hear noises down to twelve hertz. These birds are weighed down with messages meant for others, but I want to pause and consider not the messages we send and receive but the pigeon herself.

The other day, at breakfast, we watched one swoop from a solitary spot atop a building down to the ground beside us. She bobbed her head as she moved, though I later learned this was not exactly true. She moved as she kept her head still. To others, she appears to be moving in a fractured, broken manner, but she’s keeping her head still for as long as possible, steadying her gaze so she can find those breadcrumbs dropped from your scone. You reached your hand toward the creature so many see as dirty and diseased. You reached your hand towards her and coo-ed.

VI

I refused to see my dad after he drowned. I sat in the parking lot and watched the light move across the pavement while my mom went inside to see his face at the mortuary. The next time I saw him, he had been reduced to handfuls of featherweight ash and ragged chunks of bone. We set him adrift in the ocean and under the oak trees on the hill above the house that he had built for us: a thousand little burials. The year he died, we carried him into the Trinity Alps and we found a bird’s nest and filled it with mosses and purple spruce cones and a scoop of his ashes. We waded into a snowmelt creek and set the nest loose, and although at first it curved back toward us on a slow eddy, we waited till it settled into its momentum and slipped between the rocks and out of sight downstream. We hoped it would find its way to the Pacific.

I know that the ash was made out of my father, but I prefer to recall his living face, intact. If I can remember, at a great distance, his creased smile, the warmth of his embrace, the way he tiptoed in to say good morning to me the day he left on his final dive trip—the way I pretended to be asleep, not knowing I’d never see him after that—then maybe that distance will preserve an unbroken thing.

The farther away stars are from us, the less they will appear to change from our perspective here on earth. The longer the constellations will take to bend unrecognizably.

Your father, too, was buried at sea. Your family spread the carbon from his body in the ocean and walked away with hands that were no lighter than before. Ash weighs nothing and everything.

I watch Picasso the turtle shuffle through the wet sand, seaward. Turtles tend to know which way to go. Baby sea turtles, sand-speckled and waddling into the sun for the first time, will decisively begin clamoring toward the sea. When lifted—either by surf or by a human hand into the air—a baby sea turtle will immediately begin fin-flapping with the distinctive paddling motion that will propel them into deeper water. They are instinctive swimmers, wedded to movement. Researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill have been studying the ways in which turtles might use magnetic fields for navigation—to find the sea, to find their way home—just as migratory birds do.

Picasso carries a man’s ashes on his back. The man who died—an oceanographer—lived to be old but cancer claimed him abruptly in the days following Hurricane Harvey. His family and community gather near Picasso, their bare feet tucked into the sand, their faces reflecting blurrily in the sheen of shallow water. Some will follow Picasso into the surf, tossing flowers in after him, but Picasso knows—with whatever knowledge or certainty a turtle might possess—that this big swim is his and not theirs.

I say that Picasso is a male, because of his name, but the majority of sea turtles hatch out as females in our current era of climate change. Ninety-nine percent of green sea turtle hatchlings in the Great Barrier Reef were female this year alone.

She, then, let’s say—Picasso—will touch the wetter sand in a moment, where her reflection will glimmer next to the reflections of the lookers-on. Will the ashes, reflected now, shared between two mirrored turtles, weigh twice as much, or half?

When she hits the water, the ashes will disperse. Light will catch on the particles, refract, and scatter. Soon, she’ll lift off into a bigger current, widening the distance between herself, the trail of ashes, the grievers, that wet and mirrored shore.

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One night, when I was younger, before I met you, I walked the beach with a friend. We ran down the splinterful boardwalk past sand dunes with frail golden fronds blanketed in darkness. We skipped onto the sand that still held some heat from the day until we came to a large tide pool. Across the black-glass water, a flashlight flickered. We signed back with ours. We kept flashing our lights back and forth until a woman ran up to us. “The turtles!” she said.

It was nesting season. During the day, you could see the wooden stakes and pink tape marking off areas with eggs. At night, if the turtles poked their head through their thin, soft shells, they’d look for moonlight to find the water. They might find flashlights and follow that light, never finding the sea. My friend and I walked back after the woman told us of the turtles. Our fathers worked together at the hospital, but I haven’t seen her since mine died. We walked back without a light.

I still feel upset, thinking that I may have tricked these small creatures into believing the moon was hung in the wrong position. Imagine holding the cratered moon in your hands. Imagine pulling the tides at night. Imagine illuminating the way home, as if it were that simple.

I was once inside, drinking wine with you and some friends, when someone suggested we go out to look at the moon. “What’s so special about the moon?” I asked. I meant to ask if it was full, or new, or a super moon, or blue moon, but I didn’t say anything of those things. “The moon is fucking amazing, Maddie,” someone said, and we all laughed and stepped outside but couldn’t find it in the sky; it was too early in the night.

I don’t know why, but men seem to assume I want to look at the moon with them. They aren’t always wrong, but I wonder what it is in me that speaks to a lunar quality. The moon orbits the earth and reflects the sun we don’t often see at night. The moon is just another mirror, but an opaque one at that, a cloudy one, one in some serious need of Windex.

I wonder if we will ever be seen for who we are, yet I keep placing us in things we aren’t. I want to see the moon for what it is. Luna is the earth’s only natural satellite, and she is slipping away from us at approximately four centimeters a year. We can’t maintain proximity forever. Someday, the moon will roll away, out of orbit, into another life with another planet, another reflection, but for now, she is ours.

I don’t often think about what will happen when we move away from each other. Both of us, certainly, won’t stay here in Tucson for long. We migrate from home to home, never staying in one place for more than a few years, and I think perhaps it’s because we know the center cannot hold. There’s a twinness in our understanding that things fall apart. There’s a recognition between us. We’re not mirrors, but two people who understand what loss means, who understand what love means. We both know that in love, there is always loss. People die, people leave, people aren’t who we thought they were. The moon is inching away from us, and still, tonight, when we meet to listen to music, to drink IPAs and citrus cocktails, I will ask if you want to look at the moon and you won’t ask me what’s so special about it. You will put your arm around me and look at Luna, look at how she lies down beside Gemini, their alignment temporary, maybe, but permanent too, permanent for us, if only in that moment.