"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
I miss her every day. Every waking moment. Despite my utmost attempts at distraction (adventures with mother, games with my cousins, aunts, uncles, and the like), that heavy feeling of loneliness always finds its way to the cage of my ribs. As natural as our separation ought to be given the fact that we never stood together in the real world, that lingering sense of oneness we'd shared in the womb for those many months renders peace impossible for us. Or at least difficult in the extreme.
Where once I was whole, I am now but half.
Sometimes, I whisper to mother one night, with tears in my eyes, it feels like I'm a twin whose twin died. I don't know how to be alone. And as I break down, Solace envelops me in her warm, feathered embrace, murmuring empathetic and compassionate words to me until I calm. Though my breathing steadies, inside, I feel as though I might die from the ache of missing her.
That all being said, I live for the times when Iri and I can be together: when I fall to sleep.
She never takes long to find me when I start into dreaming (in fact she never misses my arrival at all) and tonight finds us in no different of a situation. Having settled down in the coconut grove with mama and mother for the night, I fell asleep in record time (something about my twin being dream locked causing me to be ultra-sleep-trained); and, with her name upon my lips before I even realize that her dreamscape surrounds me, I awaken on the other side.
She misses him too, the counterpart of her heart, the other piece of a soul torn in two. Time spent without him is time spent trying to distract herself, trying to discover who she is when she is not his Iri, his red and white shadow tucked into the crook of his shoulder and beneath wings as beautiful as a midnight sky. The hardest part was losing the rhythm of him, the beat of his heart and the thrum of life in his veins as he laid beside her in the dark for a millennium, before time found meaning in the light.
So she memorized the passing of his time, the stretch of day winding down into night, the moment when the sun slips beneath the horizon and into a bed of dark and twilight sky. And when she knows the time is drawing nearer, marked by her own dreamed up days and nights, she waits for him in whatever special place she’s built them. Sometimes she is left waiting for what feels like forever, but mostly he is there immediately, and she tackles him in a hug just as she does tonight.
“Indi!” She cries, and there is such easy love and laughter and radiant warmth in the quiet of such a gentle sunshine voice as she buries herself against him, leaned into his body and with her nose buried in his mane. She loves to breathe in the smell of his hair, to be tangled together like this until either deep sorrow or bright laughter pries them apart. But she is unwilling to be sad today, and she kisses his shining white with the soft of her whiskered lips.
“Are you tired, Indi?” She asks, her little tail waggling softly behind her in a way that she has not been able to shake, not even as her legs grow longer and her body more slender, time giving her expression a sense of newfound wisdom. Sometimes all they do is come here and lay together, a tangle of legs and limbs and gorgeous wings, blue spilling against red spilling against white. She doesn’t mind the quiet though, will always love laying beside her brother, this boy she loves so completely. But sometimes he isn’t tired, or he just pretends not to be, and they play for hours in a world she builds from both of their imaginations. Secretly, she’s hoping the latter is the kind of night he wants to have.
Her voice calling is the melody made to unlock my heart. In an instant we clasp one another here in the dreamscape, the lines of what ought to be our "beings" blurring. Having dreamt together with mother and mama since long before our births, it feels natural to disintegrate past the lines drawn for other, normal people. Where in the real world we are forced to be two, here, at least, we can again be one.
I press a kiss to the fiery red of her shoulder at the exact moment she does mine, ready for whatever adventure she dreamt up for me tonight.
"Never," I answer with a shrill, exuberant whinny and a buck up of my heels. "Please please tell me you have somewhere to take me tonight!" I punctuate my pleading by zipping towards her and taking her wagging tail in my mouth to chew on it ever so softly before administering one affectionate tug, and release. "Oh, but wait!"
With that, I leap around to face the side of the dreamscape that she hadn't painted (or that at least appeared less realized than the direction we'd been headed). Knowing she would allow me to make use of her powers, I close my eyes and brace my small muscles and imagine the sunset I'd glimpsed that day with my uncles and cousins. I imagine it so hard that when I open my eyes what seems like eons later, it appears there in front of me: a sky of red, pink, orange, blue, green, and navy, so vibrant and enhanced that I just know that she's added some embellishments.
But that's the point of coming here; we get to make things larger, better, than life.
It's always better than life, here with her.
Stepping back alongside Iri, I toss my head and snag her ear in my mouth (I stand taller than my twin by quite a significant amount, making this an easy feat) to lip it with fondness. "Whaddya think, Iridian?" I ask. "And don't think I haven't forgotten about our adventure!"
