All I want is to wake up to you. To wake up to your tousled hair, your slightly parted lips, the body heat you're emanating from a night spent sleeping side-by-side. I could get up and make us both coffee, bring it to the bed and sit side-by-side sipping quietly. We wouldn't say anything, content in one another's presence. Being there with you, knowing you're in the next room, hearing the sound of the sink as you watch your heads - each a little present in and of itself. There's nothing I'd rather do on Valentine's Day than quarantine with you. Instead, I wake alone, looking forward only to a FaceTime call connecting us across an ocean.

Captive to our screens, fingers flying across keyboard, phone or other device of choice, we are constantly generating thousands of pieces of text at a rate no previous generation comes close to matching. Much of it may fall (far) short of the Strunk & White standards of what is traditionally "correct" writing but that does not mean it is not "good." Of course, it may be bad for other reasons, but what makes writing good in my opinion is its ability to engage and fascinate, to put feelings, experiences, phenomenon into words in a way that is both suprising and relatable. I don't think that requires the most elevated vocabulary or a novel's worth of insight - 140 characters is admittedly short, and an Instagram caption doesn't allow for lengthy exposition, but that doesn't mean that good writing in those media can't be achieved. Not only can it be done, but it matters - good writing will get read, shared and read again - so it is both a writer's duty to create it, and the reader's task to recognize and appreciate it.

Two hours to landing, and he's shoveling down several rows of sushi now, soy sauce stains on his Tommy Bahama shirt. Not the most considerate seatmate, but he's kept to himself throughout the flight. I'm a row behind and diagonal. I can see what he's been watching on his phone for the past two hours and it's nothing more interesting than last season of "Game of Thrones." I'm thankful it's nothing more graphic than that.

I was reluctant to this seat, but needing to get to New York for work with less than twenty-four hours notice made it the only option. The privileged expat community in the Bahamas is small, and my friend Rich offered a spot on his plane already headed that way. Little did I know who my seatmates would be.

I've heard he'll be arrested when we land. I hope he is.

The problem had stumped the mathematic establishment for years. Henry had first heard of it as an undergraduate at MIT, but had only truly begun to work on it after receiving tenure at the university in the mathematics department. It was a complex problem, deemed the Aftbach Conundrum after the 19th-century German professor who had formulated its parameters. While initially intrigued, Henry had increasingly become obsessed with in recent years. There had been a cascading series of events as aspects of his life dropped away, narrowing his focus and attentions from the broader world inward to his now mundane, repetitive routine. His son was grown-up, moved away, with a wife and no grandkids, who visited no more than once a year at most. His beloved wife, passed away from cancer four years ago. No pets, no plants – nothing to take care of or nurture other than his work. Which is why he sat, at 2 a.m. in his study, eyes blurry staring at the piece of paper in his hand. He’d done it, he thought. Solved it. The piece of paper trembling in his hand, as elation and exhaustion shuddered through him.

His eye fluttered open, the sunlight from the window shining into his eyes. It was a dream. And just like that, the solution was gone.

I've never thought I'd be someone who considered ending it all themselves. Not because my life was particularly great, but because it was always something that had happened to me. I was the passive object, not the active, doing subject. I was 27 years old and so far nothing in my life had seemed like a choice I'd made. We've moved around a lot when I was a kid, my mom never able to hold down the same fast-food job for very long. I got used to packing up the car, leaving behind schools (never friends, I didn't make any) and heading to a new town. College wasn't a question, so when I turned 18 I took a job at the same McDonald's my mom was working at at the time. It was right before she'd been diagnosed with cancer, the fast-acting kind that left her dead six months after diagnosis. I'd quit to take care of her, and the measly entirety of our money had been poured into the futile treatment regimen, so that at the end of it I was left without a mom, without a job and without a house. That was how I ended up out on the streets, wandering, begging, scavenging - it's nearly a decade now, a point I won't let it get to. Rather than wait for the next sharp arrow of misery, I've had enough.

She put down the knife, satisified. There were exactly five - apple slices, that is. It was the only way she could eat, in precise and therefore uncontaminated quantities. Each food conveyed a different number to her. Apples screamed five, oranges a scant three (the rest of the fruit discarded), hard-boiled eggs four at a time. Her meals consisted only of the types of food that had clear demarcations, where you could definitely know a finite item had been consumed. Salads were her worst nightmare. Just seeing the uncontained chaos of ingredients, entwining and overlapping with one another, nearly made her scream. So she avoided places she might encounter those demons, or any other inflammatory and anxiety-inducing food amalgamations. That's how her world had shrunk to her small apartment, this meticulously organized kitchen. Picking up one crisp piece of the apple, she bit down, relishing the clean sensation.

First it was the playground, then it was the classroom, then the hallway and now finally here, the school administration’s office. All the other children in her second-grade class had been picked up by parents - the most eager ones came right at the bell, after-school treat in hand, eager to hear about their precious darlings’ mundane Wednesday learning cursive. The more lackadaisical ones (maybe Little William or Gemma was their third kid, the “bonus” / “mistake” child) floated in fifteen to twenty minutes after dismissal. After the half hour mark, the kids were shuttled back to the classroom, the dwindling herd of first through fifth graders who were still hanging around all clumped together. Around the 5:45pm mark, a second burst of parents, the working ones, burst in, scooping up their children alternately apologetically and warily, half-expecting to be chastised by the nonplussed teacher for daring to work and take care of a kid full-time. 

Taylor was never sure which group her mom would be - the first, second or third (and final) wave. She worked but it was full-time part-time - some weeks she’d be waiting tables at a restaurant and walking dogs on the side, other weeks she’d be taking cleaning and babysitting jobs at the upscale gated community not far from the more run-down set of single-family homes where they lived. Taylor loved when her mom was in the first group, but today had not turned out to be one of those days. 

She was sitting in the school administrator’s office, having been led there when the last of the kids had been picked up, 15 minutes after the 6:30pm cut-off time. It was 7pm now and the two remaining school administrators weren’t sure what to do with her. They’d tried calling her mom, but no answer. “Is there anyone else we can call for you?” they’d asked her. Taylor just shook her head. Her dad lived in another country now, her grandmother and grandfather passed away, no aunts or uncles. It was just her and her mom, which Taylor liked. All the movie outings, dinners at home, trips to the playground - always just the two of them. 

The school administrators were unsure what to do, but couldn’t in good conscience leave Taylor alone. They switched on the television, settled in to watch the local news headlines on the hour. “Breaking news: local woman reported missing. Last whereabouts unknown - please get in contact with the police if you have any information regarding the case.” The picture that flashed up on the TV screen to accompany the headline was the face Taylor saw smiling down at her in the morning, the face that sang her lullabies to sleep, that crinkled in laughter when she made a joke and in worry when she complained of sickness or aches. It was her mom’s face. Taylor looked down at her shoelaces and began to quietly cry.

Other people might have recognized at once the blessing that was your existence, our reunion, but it took me a while. I remember the shock I felt reading that first e-mail you sent me, relating the story, 30 years unknown and then just come to light, of how our mother had to give me up, unable to feed two hungry mouths on her meager waitress' salary once our father left two months before we even arrived. I'd known I was adopted but I hadn't known there'd been a choice, a parallel life-path I could have traveled but that you, my sister, did instead.

The tone of your e-mail was warm, excited, congratulatory - we had both gained a sibling hadn't we? But my reaction was anger, unease, resentment. Why had you been chosen instead of me? Had I cried louder, demanded more, been less cute? The sense of shameful inadequacies I'd combated and thought I had successfully overcome when told of my own adoption resurfaced, voices questioning my ability to be loved by others.

I sat there for five, then ten, then thirty minutes, unsure what to respond, how to respond. My eventual reply was terse and non-committal, confirming the details of my adoption that confirmed I was indeed the discarded twin. Your reply was almost immediate, eager to meet up and finally meet your genomic copy. In a daze, I agreed and immediately regretted doing so.

I had finally come to a point in life where I was comfortable, was settled, thought I knew who I was. To have all of that painstaking progress evaporate in the span of an e-mail was frustrating, to put it lightly. As irrational as it was, it was you I was mad at you, you who I felt was at fault. I didn't see how the turmoil, the identity reevaluation I was experiencing, could be worth it.

And then I met you. And it was stranger and funnier and more joyous than I could ever have imagined. It was a mirror, me staring at me, you staring at you, laughing the same laugh and smiling the same smile. Whatever anger I'd had dissipated, long forgotten and locked away in the era that was before you. Now everything is after you, which makes everything that came before pale in comparison. What initially seemed shattering turned out to be sustaining, an improbable flowering of family that I had at first shunned and then embraced.

A stone

I can’t dislodge

In the pit of my stomach

Every time

I wake

To the empty space