Tidal

From the beginning, it was the two of us. AliandMeg. MegandAli. Those two. The girls. Like we were sisters. Twins. Like we were one. Pushed in a double stroller down sidewalks by the bay, seagulls overhead, mistaking each other's thumbs for our own, babbling a language we surely understood.

We started school together, desks and braids side by side, mine dark and sleek, hers a mess of golden curls, barely contained by the elastics her single dad stretched around them. She kicked Kyle Clark in the shins when he teased me for crying on the first day of Pre-K. “You have toothpaste on your shirt,” she noted, wiping the smirk off his face.

We sat in the field at recess, making crowns out of daisy-chains because I was too afraid of the other kids who knew how to play and laugh and have fun without worrying, whose shoulders weren’t constantly up by their ears in a perpetual state of anxiety. Who knew what to say, and when to say it.

She shared her fruit snacks. I shared my oreos. Neither of us ate our bologna sandwiches.

In highschool Ali dragged me out of my bedroom to the football games, ignoring me when I said I had homework “Oh my GOD, Meg, it’s Friday night.” And even though I complained the whole walk there, I still chanted and cheered with the crowd. Even when we inevitably lost.

She taught me how to use chopsticks, horrified when I asked for a fork for my sesame chicken. “Unacceptable”

She made me practice the quadratic equation until I could repeat it in my sleep, even though I never understood it, because Mr. Larkin wouldn’t pass me until I could write it out on an exam.

I don’t remember the first time we held hands, but I remember how it felt. Like a coming home. A warmth that started inside and radiated out to my fingertips and toes. It was never a secret, not really, our town wasn’t like that. It was easy.

I do remember our first kiss, though. She must have timed it, because there were literal fireworks over the water, illuminating the sky above us and the rippling surface around us. Showers of brilliant color raining down. My heart was a wild rabbit in my chest.

Sometimes I think I see her on the street, walking past our favorite cafe, her golden hair a halo backlit by the California light. An ephemeral flame. I try to meet her eye, but of course I can’t. Her presence always held the gravitational force of the sun, pulling me in, holding me close. No escape, even if I’d wanted one.

Mostly, though, I see her in the trees around the secluded lake where we camped. Soft and radiant light filtering through the branches and pine needles. “God rays,” we once said. The smell of clean earth and fledgling campfires surrounding us.

I see her at the bay. Day ending. Sun sinking behind the water. The sky a cacophony of colors I could never imagine on my own.

“Is that one?” She exclaimed, grabbing my hand.

I scanned the waters with her, looking for a bobbing head, a playful swish of a tail. “Just a duck,” I said apologetically.

I see her at the pier, among the throngs of tourists, her steady gait carrying her farther and farther away, while the boardwalk bustles with life and music and the exhilarated shouts from the rollercoasters.

I walk home barefoot, alone. One half of a whole. A moon without a sun to illuminate her.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper behind me, my only answer the sound of the lapping tide.

The ocean doesn’t say a word. Not ever. She just rises and falls, like the chests of my children when they were babies sleeping in their cribs. She takes my salty tears as her own, as her due. But even so, she doesn’t pull me under.

She just undulates steadily, with varying degrees of calm and chaos. Reflecting back the brilliant colors of the sky and setting sun. Pink and orange and purple and gold.

Eventually the colors fade, then vanish for today. I hold my breath, waiting for the Green Flash, but it never comes, and I’m not even sure it exists. The moon rises, providing a bit of light in the darkness, and the stars unveil themselves, rebelling against an inky night sky.

My feet go numb with cold, and I know it’s time to leave.

My hand aches without hers to hold, even still.

I walk the four blocks back to the house, the asphalt still holding the ghost of the day’s heat. My feet track wet, cold sand onto the porch, gritty evidence of my pilgrimage that I am too weary to clean.

The house is quiet. The children, older now, played online behind closed doors. The moment had been as mine alone; a solitary mourning ritual that had replaced my teenage anxiety, settling into the bones of my life like damp sea air.

I peel off my wet jeans and leave them in a crumpled, salty pile on the laundry room floor. In the harsh kitchen light, the absence of her presence is deafening. There was a time, not so long ago, when coming home meant the sound of her voice, high and melodic, wondering where I’d been and if I’d gotten her a latte, followed immediately by the warm weight of her hand on my shoulder.

We bought this house together, Ali and I. A tiny, creaking bungalow blocks from the water, just after college. It was a chaotic mess of peeling paint and warped floorboards, but it had a lemon tree in the backyard and a window in the bedroom that faced west. We spent that first summer painting the trim an impossible shade of teal, arguing over which shade of yellow was “happier” for the kitchen, drinking cheap wine and sleeping on a mattress pad on the floor.

I remember her, covered head-to-toe in a fine white powder from sanding, her golden curls bushy – cotton candy catching the sunlight. She looked at me, smeared a stripe of paint across my nose without breaking eye contact, and laughed with her head tipped back. A sound like wind chimes – clear, beautiful, and utterly free. Shimmering, evanescent bubbles of joy.

“We’re doing this, Meg,” she’d said, her voice raspy with certainty. “We’re really doing this.”

She’d meant the house.

She’d meant the life.

She’d meant us.

I trace the outline of a scar on my palm, a tiny white line I got trying to open a jar of pickles for her that summer. The overwhelming physicality of her memory is what breaks me, today and every other day. It’s not the grand moments – the fireworks kiss, the football games – it’s the small, rough edges of our daily collisions. The way she smelled like sunscreen and basil after working in the garden. The way her sock would inevitably slip half-off her foot when she curled up reading. The way her hand fit mine, custom made puzzle pieces.

That certainty she held, that we're-doing-it-ness, was the anchor to my drifting. I realize now that I confused her presence with my own stability. When she was there, I was solid. When she left – not vanished, but simply left, a door closing quietly in the dark – I became unmoored, searching for the gravitational pull of her star in every fading sunset, every rushing tide. And so I return, day after day, waiting for the rumor of a verdant flash of light.

I keep waiting for my own sudden, impossible moment of clarity; the understanding that she isn’t just gone, but that her leaving has an explanation that fits the scale of our shared life. But the ocean just rises and falls, offering neither condemnation nor forgiveness, only an endless, steady, rhythm. The rhythmic absence of Ali.

I walk into the kitchen, the linoleum cold against my arches, and reach for a mug. It’s the one with the chipped rim, the one she refused to throw away because it had character. I feel the phantom brush of her knuckles against mine as we’d both reach for the coffee pot in the pre-dawn grey, our movements a synchronized dance of half-asleep habit. The air in the house still holds the faint, sharp ghost of the eucalyptus she used to hang in the shower, a scent that always meant safety.

I lean against the counter, the silence of the sleeping house pressing in, and find myself listening for the specific, rhythmic thumps of her boots on the porch, a sound that once signaled the end of my workday and the beginning of our life. Now, it’s just the settling of the foundation, a creak that mimics a footstep and leaves me breathless for a second too long.

I see her always. Everywhere and anywhere. Places we went and places I’ve only gone without her. Before and after. Then and now.

And I feel her. I forever feel her. In and around me. She’s there, always, when I wade ankle-deep into the ocean, feeling the tide sink my feet into the sand. With every gentle swell that washes over my toes, I’ll keep letting myself sink a little deeper, finally giving into the weight of her absence.