let lemons be angry

Sometimes she looks in the mirror and gets a shock, because she sees me. It's not the features exactly. It's something else, our regard for the world perhaps, that makes one face like the other.

At my age she boarded the Logos and sailed around the world, living in Europe, Africa, India. At my age she left my father, her then-boyfriend, and went to do what God was telling her to do. This photograph is of her at twenty-four, married and in Singapore.

If we regard the world in the same way, with that arch of the eyebrow and a settled mouth, why is my life so different from hers when she was my age? It seems like all opportunity for life change hangs in the next three years, the time gap between us in our photographs.

In some ways I'm doing what she didn't get to do in her time. In other ways I'm doing what she used to do--drawing, writing, answering the phone in her voice. But always there is an envy, the same kind of envy that I imagine someone has of a twin whose life just seems to make more sense.