out of a Monet painting

1000 Places To See Before You Die by Patricia Schultz

8 min @ Sorauren parkette

There was something untethered about Ruth.  She never seemed fully present.  Angella said it was because of her one off-centered eye.  She had those eyes that you never knew which one to look into so you just kind of looked at the edges of her.  But Ruth had no edges, she was kind and amorphous.  She blended into the space around her.  People thought she was spacey but she followed three conversations at once at dinner parties.  Angella said it was a party trick, like how people repeat someone’s name upon meeting them to lock it into their memory.  If anyone knew Ruth’s tricks it would her twin, but what happens to the twin bond when you’re separated at birth?

It was on their eighteenth birthday that both Angella and Ruth went in search of their birth parents.  They’d been catching up on lost time for the past three years.  Angella secretly hoped to get a clearer outline of herself, even as she struggled to understand what made Ruth unknowable.