Lesmosyne runs happily toward the shore. She’s always cold, except in water.
She shouldn’t be here, but she’s glad she is. She has a heart, presence, the taste of sugary fruit in her mouth.
She swims with the woman who birthed this body. When alone, she prefers to float on her back, her arms and legs spread out, gazing at the flesh-pink sky. Her parents always tell her not to stray too deep. Even near the shore, she’s hard to keep track of, her small form camouflaged by rushing waves, her limbs easily confused for driftwood. She never listens.
She licks her watermelon slice twice to judge its worth. If it doesn’t meet her standards, she slips it on another’s plate, snatches a new one. No one notices.
She’s new, empty, ready. She wants to feel everything.
*
She grows and the world solidifies around her. She knows her body isn’t hers — it’s wrong and itchy. She’s skin, limbs, and eyes, just like everyone else, yet somehow she feels she shouldn’t be.
How to place the words, to form the question? She wants to ask the people she calls parents, curious if they’ve ever felt this way, but she decides they’re too busy, too angry at each other. She knows it’s her fault — their repetitive arguments, the biting responses — a consequence of her being here. She takes them as offerings, tucks them inside her. The overcooked pasta; the cruelty of her mother’s working hours; her father’s unwillingness to help with housework. Her parents forget them, start them anew.
The vessel holds. It always has. Long before this body.
*
She’s an adult, and not much has changed. She fears and desires the same things – she’s angered by the same things. It’s not supposed to be this way. Restless, she wants to try another life in another country, where her skin won’t constantly burn, where it won’t be ravaged by mosquitoes.
The dream lifts like a bloody bandage to uncover the ugliness of her new home: bodies compressed by a leaden city, no more capable of holding their memories than the Danaids’ jars can hold water.
Mnemosyne visits her in dreams. ‘Sister,’ she calls. The word is a kindness. She doesn’t want her real name used. Not in this form.
‘What have you learned from your time here?’
She tells her that we’re as good as our stories. She has an okay life — better than most — but she still tells other people’s stories. Her parents’, her acquaintances’, her former home’s. They hum gently in her mind, like wind rushing through gaps in the wall of a ruined house. There is no now in conversations, only then. Mnemosyne nods.
‘Little magpie,’ she says, her smile razor-sharp. ‘You know this body is just a vessel.’
Her parents are still together. They’re gentler with each other, their arguments more varied now that she’s gone.
They write here, and there.