Untraceable

One day, when I was trapped inside for too long, I was itching to run. It had been raining steadily, but at the first sign of a break, I took off. Less than a mile in, the rain resumed. I looked up at the gray sky, felt the droplets slide down my cheeks, and laughed. My arms stretched outwards by their own volition, reaching for something unknown, and I continued to run as my clothes began to stick to my skin, as the pavement glistened like it had been greased. Perhaps these spring rains had come to wash what once was and make it clean.

The road I took sloped down and I slowed my steps, attempting not to slip. My feet kept themselves rooted even as my running shoes grew damp, and in this memory I am upright, but here I have been slipping, over and over. I think about these words, the you that is me and the you that is someone else, and I believe if I cannot slip in my present moments then at least I can here on the page. So I will write about you but the you may also be me. The curiosity of writing this emerges in the untangling.

Splashing in the pool behind my house. Tapping my small fingers on piano keys. Writing single chapters of novels that plagiarized my favorite shows. Playing make-believe games or with tadpoles in the water. Rollerblading along my driveway or tainting my fingers with chalk. The most distinct memories of my childhood are mere flashes.

I may not remember much, but I remember always wanting to climb trees, to be larger than myself—to find something larger than myself. Always looking out, always looking up, always looking around. And I never wanted to be found. Now I sit on the ground and write sad poems and look straight ahead, too far ahead, wanting what’s ahead. Maybe I should climb a tree.

A few days ago, I swung on a swing set and let my feet test the dirt beneath me. I’ve heard some say this is the practice of grounding, connecting with mother earth, but I know only one mother, my mother, and she grows vegetables in the summer. I wonder if this is what grounding can mean. I remember creating dance routines with friends before I studied the art form, utilizing damp grass, bare feet, wide backyards. I wonder if this practice of grounding may now provide a sense of freedom, that childlike urge to dance. I only need to find an open patch of grass, shed my shoes, and move without the fear of slipping—unless this is grounding.

You remember the days when you had long hair and how that must not be you. You consider the fact that the person you once were is a person you’ll never know, but your parents, your elders, do. What an existence to live in a place that you can’t remember but others can. Now your friends look at your short hair and ask, Did you ever have it long? and you show them pictures from middle school, a family trip to Bar Harbor, Maine. You grow it out now to see if you’ll discover new versions of yourself with each length. Then you try to remember how the town got its name, how Bar Harbor connects to Bar Island, only seen at low tide, and there was a day when your feet took that path, but it’s hazy around the edges, which diverts your attention, and now you’re stuck thinking about how long your hair has grown.

Corn stalks across corn fields, trimmed low from recent harvest, surrounded my sister and I’s leisurely bike ride one summer night. The topic of conversation eludes me now, but I remember her words.

I wish you would talk about yourself more, she said. I wish you would tell people about your accomplishments. Why don’t you tell them you’ve written a book?

I can’t recall my reaction. Maybe I shrugged. Maybe I stared at the gravel rolling underneath my tires. They don’t ask because they don’t know, I responded. And I don’t know how to speak without first having permission.

This isn’t the truth of what I said, but the idea is the same. I have never been one to share without first being welcomed to it. I admire those who can, but I cannot exude the same confidence.

I wrestle with this, now, as I write. To offer so much of myself that no one asked for. I am more comfortable with fiction, the commonly fictionalized, the safe distance between my life and the words I string together. So what do I share, here, as my sister asks?

My legal name is Grace, but I often cringe to hear it aloud. I hardly correct people, but Gracie fits much better, like a right-sized coat. When I was three, I went to the hospital with pneumonia. On the ambulance ride that transitioned me from a local hospital to a larger one in Baltimore, I screamed and pulled an IV needle out of my arm without settling until an EMT blew up a glove like a balloon. I danced the part of Snow Queen in The Nutcracker in a high-school ballet production after having half of my toenail removed from a subungual hematoma due to dancing en pointe. My favorite color is blue and I go on runs with my dog in the summer.

This is what my sister meant, right?

Recently, I drove near a reservoir, my eyes cutting glances between the road and the landscape of the water. I’ve driven here many times in the past year we’ve been apart, but suddenly a memory came: us, driving with the tabby cat wailing in the carrier on my lap. I found her a few days prior and was determined to find her family. I thought my mind had imagined a meowing in the walls until I saw her outside, three stories down from my balcony, perusing in the bushes with a feline grace. When we pulled into the driveway, you tried to comfort me and I tried not to cry. I held the carrier to my chest with white knuckles. Later, in one single moment, the carrier transferred from my hands to another’s and she was gone. Silent tears wet the clinical fabric of the mask I wore. The wails faded, and the carrier, empty this time, was given back to me. I looked down at its bareness. In a few days, I would listen to a missed voicemail and learn that the shelter had found her home, her real home, not the makeshift one I had created. Back in the car, you let me cry and didn’t judge me for it. You were a steady presence, even though you barely knew me. You asked questions, made lighthearted jokes, held my hand. I pulled my legs up onto the seat, hugged them, and slid down like a slow, meticulous sinking into sand.

My sister and I have a habit of saying “sister” when others find it more interesting to hear “twin.” We are not carbon copies, twin flames, mirrored souls. I am unsure of the meaning of soulmates in a spiritualistic ideology, but I do wonder if our two halves put together make a whole. Like high and low tide pulled by the moon and sun’s gravitational forces, interconnected and working in tandem, but unique parts of the Sol star system.

Our older brother, when my sister and I shared our mother’s womb, wanted to name us Annie and Clarabel after the Thomas the Tank Engine books. Much to his disappointment, my mother decided against it. We were preemies, underweight but healthy, born less than a week from Christmas and given middle names—Noelle and Joy—appropriate to the time.

In a few months, my sister is getting married and it will be the first time we’ll be apart, really apart, not just separated by a few weeks before coming back together. I imagine myself, on her wedding day, as a father giving her away, because if anyone is being cleaved apart, it’s me, thinking of the days we shared in my mother’s womb and how you cannot become closer to another quite like this.

I have been considering why I write about you. I have begun to wrestle with wanting to write you out of this narrative and yet continuing to see more memories arise. Write about something else. I see you as a device to enter into other thoughts, other memories. But what if you are the through-line, the focus, the place where these moments converge? What if I don’t want you to be? Write about something else.

When I was a toddler, I used to eat whole Celebrity tomatoes while sitting on my grandfather’s stationary tractor. There’s an old photograph that froze the moment, so I know it’s real. The tomatoes came from my grandparents’ garden, and my siblings and I would process them down with their help to create a sauce. We were all covered in juice by the end, my grandfather’s white shirt stained soft red as proof—another photograph. I would not be able to describe this moment without them. My memory has released these places of my past.

I have become accustomed to saying goodbye to much, but not to my grandfather. Often I think of his absence, and it jars me to the reality that he is no longer here and I begin down a panic of time, how it passes without my approval, how the joyful memories of where he used to be is a place hard to find.

I haven’t figured out how to write about him. I worry that after these words are written, it will be confirmation he is gone.

I have a growing fear of letting go of my dreams. I realize I am young and little can come to fruition all at once. I don’t want to lose anything that has been part of me, even if in thought alone, for I fear what may follow if those suitcases are packed and sent off.

This isn’t the end—this is just the beginning, my mom wrote to me as I neared graduation. Don’t be afraid to chase your passions. And so I will. I will chase until these feet falter. They have yet to grow weary, and so I have yet to stop.

Can you grieve something before its end? Before even an inclination that it may come to an end? A pre-grieving, of sorts. Perhaps I am pre-grieving to protect myself from the possibility of failing.

Still, I refuse to stop. These feet will set chase.

I remember a dream. I wind up at a small school in autumn. There is a flowing quality to the leaves, a blend of color like chalk on pavement, cloudy and unclear but there. It’s my first day and you are there. I can tell it’s you because I have seen your picture. Here, it is as if I know you. You are sitting with a group of friends, but we speak, too. I don’t remember what you said to me. I am in a rush, not yet late for my first day but worried, for I haven’t memorized the layout of campus. We speak and then you pull me in, holding me close, and I sink into your body like I have known you, like you have known me, and something stirs, but the reality is clear enough that I pull away toward whatever building lies in front of me and I call after you that I have to go, we can talk later, not saying what I want, to just let you hold me again, that if I had control over this I would stay, but my legs are not my own, and so they take me to the building, for this is the one truth of this moment, that I am concerned about being late because of course I am concerned about being late. I don’t remember what happened to those friends. Maybe you sit back down with them in the warm grass, the open quad, or maybe they disappear and were never really there. All I know with certainty is that I woke up and you were gone, back to a picture, and I didn’t know you. I can remember this.

You don’t like to think about time. You think about time like you tread water. One glimpse below, the cloudy image of your legs and arms circling through the water to stay afloat; but one glimpse won’t do much. Spend enough time thinking about time, the way moments intersect and flow without end, and you begin to feel your limbs grow heavy, you begin to think of the depth of the water, you begin to wonder about the unknowns below, you begin to draw in breath more rapidly. You sink in the endless abyss of time yet recall the fragility of time’s quick erasure.

Goodbyes echo. The goodbye of my sister on her wedding night, waving from the car. The goodbye of my grandfather, my cheek pressed against his. The goodbye of my roommates from college, our apartment bare, as if it never held our existence, after which I wept in my mother’s arms like an inconsolable child. These goodbyes echo; I hear their sound waves reverberated back to me. They do not exist in one moment, but many. Because now, even now, I mourn these goodbyes, whispering quietly to myself to make them real.

I wonder if writing about you will purge you from my skin. I cannot be sure who you is. I don’t know which you is you. I don’t know which you is me. Others exist here, too. Water through fingers—the image that arises now, slippery, untraceable, and unclasped. I refuse to make a fist.

I’m unsure of where this starts and where it ends. It exists without boundaries, or at least, I suppose that’s how grief feels. I wonder if this is the end of writing of this, or if it’s only the beginning. Write about something else.