12 Days of Xmas: You Were You and I was Me and Together Were We
YOU WERE YOU AND I WAS ME AND TOGETHER WERE WE
They were twins. Triplets once. But then there were only two of them left, the other faded away into memories that only they remembered. Nobody else even knew her name. She’d faded away like the moon on a sunlit day.
“We are the sun and the moon, and she was our star,” Hamlet murmured. He was wearing his favorite tank top, the one with the rainbow stripe across the chest. “I miss her.”
Mac sighed. “I hate that we’re the only ones that remember her. She was the most important person in our lives, and nobody knows about her but us. I don’t even think the kids we went to school with remember her anymore. We all looked the same. They used to confuse us all the time.”
“Remember when we’d all wear the same outfit and we’d pretend to be each other? She was a better me than me.”
Hamlet laughed and it sounded like tears that wanted to fall. “She was the best of us. I miss her so much.”
It was the anniversary of her death. Of the day that had taken her from them all those years ago. And yet it seemed as though her light had been extinguished merely yesterday. The ghost of her had lingered close around them, carried them through the years of her absence, been the support they had needed to function.
Their memory of her had kept them motivated. Kept them moving ever forward where she would have wanted them to go.
“She was more us than we are,” Mac said. “I hope we’ve done her proud.”
“I want to believe that we have. I want to believe that she’s smiling at us from the other side. That she’s been with us this whole time cheering us on in everything we’ve done. That even if nobody remembers her for her… they’ll remember her through us.”
“I hope they remember her through everything we ever were together and ever will be,” Mac said, holding out a glass of amber liquor. It had been poured from the first bottle ever produced by the distillery they had named after her, in memory of her, so that even those that did not remember her would know her name. Forever.
“In memory of her,” Hamlet said, sipping from his glass. “The best of us.”
“The best of us.”
=END=
~Harper Kingsley
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