Author’s note:
Waltz XO is the name of a song by the late Elliott Smith.

A Letter to Caleb

I have known you for eight months, though I have no real measure or concept of time. You are mine, I am yours. We are twin, kindred, together. I love it when you turn somersaults in our salty bath. How you swim, making our mother’s tummy prod here and there, how she feels the gentle kick of your white, half formed foot. Caleb, you say, only it is spoken in our language, a language not understood by others. You with your light bulb fingers, all clear like blue glass, pointing the way. You tell me soon it's time to go, but not yet. Not yet. To hold on you say. Hold on and don’t go.

So why are we being pushed? We are curling together, two small shrimp, see-through prawns in a tidal pool, we are gems. Then the blood comes, a rush or torrent of ruby. Too much of it and we are forced from the only home we have known. I try to hold onto you, Caleb. To hold onto your hand, your finger as you said, but I can’t. I am not strong enough yet and you go first. You are forced out and I am left alone inside, while the walls cave in, cave out. There is silence, silence except for a whooshing sound- the whooshing of the water and the blood.

A minute later, I too am whooshed out. I look everywhere for you, but everything is too bright. The room is too bright and the people are big and speak a funny language. I don’t understand what they are saying. Our mother is there. She is more beautiful than we could have imagined with her blue Madonna eyes and dark hair wrapped around her head like a turban with a blue silk ribbon to hold it back from her pale face. A tear slides down one side of her cheek as she holds me to her breast but looks over at you.

You are on a table where doctors are all around you, scrubbing off the jammy red of our home with cold water. I want to tell them how you hate the cold. How you hate to be cold and want to be warm. How we used to curl together and how that will help. I say, Just let us curl together, but no-one listens. No one cares. There are machines everywhere that make binging and bonging noises. A blip machine is attached to you. It goes blip, blip, blip. A little piece of paper comes out the other side of it with funny lines. I hear someone say this is your heart. I know it is your heart because I recognize the dance of it. The rhythm of it. I don’t understand the language, but I do know this dance, this tango of your heart. It is more like a waltz – a beautiful, slow waltz and I want it to stay that way, except it is doing a marimba or salsa because the line dances all over the paper in fits and starts and I see your beautiful white body turning blue.

Caleb! I shout. Caaaaleeeb!

I say it in our language so nobody else can hear or even understand if they could hear, then I see you lifting up from the table, your beautiful face now with its color back and your beautiful piano-finger light-bulb hands as you lift off and fly about the room then up and over us. Why can’t anyone else see you, I wonder? Mummy is still crying. I want to tell her everything will be okay. That I love Caleb too, but that you said you had to go this time.

I felt my heart break like a mirror that had shattered.

I didn’t want you to go, but I knew you had to. I nuzzled against Mummy, but she wouldn’t have it. She wanted you – her boy. What use was a girl, even if a twin, if the other twin was gone, the way you had left me, Caleb? A girl was of no use. I wanted to tell her that I was you and you were me. That we were the same, but it was no use. I didn’t have her words and she was too bereft and lost without us both.

What I remember most is the sense that you were me and I was you. That no matter what happened in the world we were symbiotic and had each other. That we always had each other and that was that. Only you had the same lemon-lime eyes as I. The same hazel-rich pools that I had never seen on anybody else. Even now, I look for those eyes and while some come close, I’ve yet to find the exact match, Caleb, for nobody could be a match but you.

Love,

me.

She held me blankly, flatly, and watched as the doctors turned off the blip machine and wrapped up your heart dance and put it in a folder with other white sheets and a picture of you, and your foot print. Mummy cried hard and I tried to cuddle her and be a comfort. I thought if I were close, but it was no use. A lady dressed in white came and took me away from Mummy. I thought of you Caleb, I saw you rise up and then I was in a glass case being wheeled away to a room full of ones just like us, only most were not together as we had been. Most had come alone, save for a few. Now I was alone. The nurse changed a colored band on my wrist from yellow, which stood for twin, to blue, which was everyone else.

She, our mother, was as beautiful as a blue Madonna, her great green eyes holding pools of saltwater tears that brimmed and then fell over the thin lip of her eye. I was now a blue, a lone girl. There were no yellow bands. No twin. No boy. Just me.

I know she hurt as much as I did then, Caleb. As much as you did with your light-bulb fingers reaching up to the sky, laughing and smiling and blowing bubbles. But even you, even you in that moment, you shed a tear and I saw you go and felt you reach out to me. I wanted to save you. Stop you from leaving.

I could do nothing.

Years later now and I still think of you, Caleb. Years later and I still remember us in our home of eight months. How you loved to make me laugh when you hiccupped. How you turned and did somersaults and flips and swam around, all fingers and toes, webbed like a fish still.

I tell my neices that hazel eyes are the best for they, too, have hazel eyes. I tell them we are blessed, we are special because of our hazel eyes and they laugh and then spend the day telling everyone how special they are.

In my heart, I feel Caleb’s heart waltz when I say this, when I write this like now… I hear his waltz and how he signs it, like the paper on the machine with its high peaks and low valleys, like a song I once heard, Waltz XO.