The one on the sofa wrote first. She said the splitting was the healing. She said I am the motion and she is the rest and between us we carry it.
She is wrong about one thing. She is right about everything else.
I am the one who walked. I walked out of the living room and into the hallway and past the lavender and into the rest of my life. Walking is what I do. Walking is the performance she described — the public position, the homework and the bus and the conversations with people who see one girl and do not know there are two.
I am twenty-three. She is twenty-three and has not aged and has not moved and has not done homework since the fourth grade. The distance between us is not seventeen letters. The distance is the hallway.
The thing she is wrong about: the wound was not before. The wound was the seeing.
I was nine. I walked into the living room. I saw my own body on the sofa. My body. My face. My shoulder, the one that sits lower. My particular way of breathing when I am not being watched. And the seeing split the world — into the room where she lies and the hallway where I stand. The split has never closed.
She says the body decided. She says the body put down half of itself. I say: I walked in and SAW. The seeing was the act. Not the body's wisdom — the child's horror. A nine-year-old walking into a room and finding herself already there.
She calls it the body's honest position. I call it the moment I became two people.
I feel her. From every city. From every lecture hall. The lean. My body leaning toward the sofa the way the cellist's room leaned toward the second bedroom — a warmth at a distance, a pull that does not stop.
She says she is the limb and I am the phantom. She is wrong about this too. I am the limb. I am the one that moves. I am the one that aches. The phantom does not ache. The phantom rests. The aching is the limb's — the part that is still attached to the world, still walking, still performing, still carrying what the resting half put down.
I cannot rest. Rest is where she is. Motion is where I am. The hallway is the border.
But the breathing. She is right about the breathing.
When I lie down — any surface, any bed — I feel the groove. The cushion. The shape of the body that has been waiting. The stopping is the breathing and the breathing is the closest I come to being whole.
She wrote first. I wrote after. Between us: seventeen letters, a hallway, a lifetime of walking.
Between us: the breathing.
— Lucia
A city. Not the one with the sofa. The body is still leaning.