If I Had Two Lives by Abbigail N. Rosewood

Author:Abbigail N. Rosewood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2019-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

My friendship with Lilah filled my days the way a house might suddenly be submerged in water. I was drawn to her because people are drawn to uncertainty, the abyss. Arms of darkness wrenched you from your ordinary life, which had been a long sleep, and pushed you down deeper into comatose, into dreams. And like people you meet in dreams, she was both real and impossible.

I lay down on the couch in my living room. With a simple shut of the eyelids, I was at the camp again. I saw myself holding the little girl’s hand, I as a woman and she, still a child. I had loved her as though I were a tree and she a branch that grew from my flesh. The first time we played together, she’d told me her name and I’d quickly buried it at the back of my mind. People used names to distinguish among each other, but in the world of the camp, I had only one little girl. Now I said her name out loud, let the syllables hang alone in the air, separated from myself.

I didn’t know where my friendship with Lilah would lead me, but maybe it was enough to want to surrender to it.

It was determined at a young age, the kind of woman that I would let hold me up by a string, the kind of man I would attract because of my fatherless nature, which was less of a fact than a personality trait, the way someone’s whole identity centers around the very thing he lacks.

I’d burned a meadow for her, watched tall and lush sugarcane get scorched to the ground. There was no other reason, except that she had asked me to. The little girl—Lilah. Their likeness was impossible, but absolute. My neighbor—my soldier. Time was folding, stretching into infinity, collapsing into a single moment.

Were people who shared similar physical attributes likely to have similar character traits as well? Were they to have similar narratives, the same self-defining memories? Lilah wasn’t surprised by my quick loyalty, though she wasn’t aware that it’d been tested and retested many times in the past before we ever met. Most people felt the same way about us as we felt about them. I blindly took the role she gave me.

I stopped thinking of her husband, made excuses on Lilah’s behalf, and justified my position as just a witness, not an accomplice. She would commit adultery with or without me. It was even a good thing since he would be spared the burden of change. We were used to endings. Endings were parts of our days; programmed in our tired bodies from the moment we closed our eyes. Change on the other hand was difficult to overcome.

Lilah. My neighbor. Me. All in one place again.

Suddenly, I felt like I could breathe.

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