The buzzing sound of the passing cars on the road were a comfort to her. She observed in a distracted way that it provided something she could focus on. It grounded her. She tuned in and out in a way that felt soothing and was able to slink in and out like someone coming slowly down from a beautifully designed benign drug. She felt like she was holding a large balloon and she was descending slowly to land on a twin balloon as she stepped down gently onto it in velvet slippers.
She knew that she had a sister. They had come from the same womb but had been born seven years apart. The same blood had pumped around their tiny hugged body in the safe amorphous jelly like shifting balloon. She wondered did their mother remember the sweet aches of tiny imagined soles of feet pressed momentarily making its tiny impression on the surface of the outer rotundity. Did she remember one of those feelings during the first period of nine months. Or did she remember the similar set of sensations in the second period of nine months all those years later.
She and her sister came from the same city but emerged from different front doors every morning. They opened different letterboxes to check post and waved at different people as they got in their cars at different times of the morning. They lived the same life but had never met. She was the elder. She was going to meet her today – the daughter that her mother had seven years after she was born that June day. Her Mother’s other daughter must have been born in April because her Facebook profile announced her name was Avril. The Mother had lived with her and her Father for four magic years. It seemed to her as though life was in technicolour then.