No matter how far away I moved from you after that break, sometime before we were

twenty, you managed to follow. Or I did.  Almost always unknowingly. That summer

of ‘69 when Dad was in the hospital and Mom had locked me out of the house

(sending me to relatives whom I’d fled) how we bumped into each other in Woods

Hole.  And I had been tripping, and had nowhere to stay and no money. Your friend

took me in. 

After graduation when we went our separate ways, ending up at that commune

where we got ensconced for twenty years, you more, me less.  And when you

couldn’t follow me physically, because I went where the broken hearted go: across

the continent to California, your pain still sought me out, dragging me downward,

threatening to take me to you down into that sea of terrors, that unconscious

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reservoir. 

After she started to loose it, my guilt turned to denial and thus, unwittingly bound me

tighter to her. Ever after I am accosted by sudden changes in the emotional currents

that take me over without warning and to which there is a certain texture that lets me

know when she is losing it again. At those times, when I phone her home, the news

from her partner is always the same:  she flipped out again.  She’s just gone into the

hospital.

Cindy was admitted to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital.  My older sister had

visited her and said that Cindy tried to throw herself out a window. My mother, who’d

also visited her, briefly described Cindy’s telling her that she thought she had a sex-

change operation upon waking from a heavily drugged sleep. In response my mother

gently said, “ Cindy, that’s your fantasy, “ to which Cindy stood corrected, saying,

“Oh”. 

I’d felt like this was it for Cindy.  Sometimes I knew she wished that she could die and

get some relief and I didn’t blame her. Would I then be able to live with myself, I’d

wondered, but then pushed the thought away.

Then, one night a friend of mine broke her hip and phoned me from the hospital

where Cindy was, requesting that I bring her some things. I was so effectively

blocking Cindy’s condition that it wasn’t until I had gone down the elevator and was

leaving the building that it dawned on me that this was where Cindy was hospitalized.

I stopped in my tracks, wondering if perhaps I were here for another reason other

than the needs of my friend. Mechanically, I turned toward the psych wing of the

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building. 

I pushed the buzzer and heard the click on the heavy glass door, which admitted me

to the hospital ward. Walking up to the glassed-in nurse’s station, I asked two

amused and smiling attendants if I could visit my twin. I acted nonchalant and

confident, hoping desperately that they would see that I was not like her. They had

known Cindy for decades due to her frequent stays and greeted me with fondness.

The nurses said “certainly” and pointed directly beside me to a door, which had a

hand written sign, that read, “Cindy’s room.” I intuited that our mother had probably

put it there to make Cindy feel at home.  

I knocked and heard an exhausted “Come in.” I nervously entered the room. On the

bed sat Cindy, looking washed out and frightened.  “Is it O.K if I visit?” I asked. 

She seemed mystified at the sight of me, as if words and feelings and images were

colliding. She paused like someone ordering from a difficult menu and finally replied

“…yes.”

I sat across from her in a chair and she peeked at me meekly, a frightened, captive

animal. 

“What took you so long?” she asked. 

Was she referring to the twenty years I’d stayed away or just the time since she’d

been admitted here?  “I was scared,” I confessed, hoping she’d understand, like she

used to be able to do so well. 

Cindy nodded—fear was her specialty. She looked at me expectantly, as if I had the

key to free her from a mental cage. I looked back blankly.  Tears flowed down her

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ashen cheeks. 

“What?” I asked.

“You’re doing good and I’m not!’” she moaned. 

“Well, that’s honest!” 

Her body jerked and Cindy jumped up. “I have to get my meds!” 

Abandoned. I surveyed the whitewashed cement block walls, the sagging disheveled

twin bed and the childish school desk in the corner where she had been scrawling.

On the wall above the desk was an odd painting, in purple splashes. 

I was amazed to feel comforted when the twin who had so pained me returned to the

room. Cindy sat across from me on the bed, eyes wide and frightened. 

“Who did the painting?” 

“A friend of mine.” 

“It looks like one of those Rorschach tests.  Is that what it is?” 

“ Yes, isn’t it good?” she smiled. I felt jubilant at that smile—I knew she’d been alive

all along. 

Now it was I who was reading the menu options to myself: Should I placate her or be

myself? With the real Cindy, we’d never been less than honest.  

I shrugged.  “Did you get your meds?” 

“Yes.” Cindy looked at me searchingly, then lay down. Something invisible and heavy

was weighing on her. “Can I ask you something?” 

“Sure,” I said. 

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“Well, I thought the attendants took my head off and put another one on with eyes

that went all the way around.... They didn’t, did they?” 

I gasped.  Collected myself.  Breathed.

“Do you really wonder that?” Inside, I was begging her to deny it. 

“Yeah, see, I just thought maybe...” she said in all earnestness, as if she’d asked a

sincere, although slightly embarrassing question, like, “Excuse me, but where is the

bathroom?” 

I recovered my belief and pride in her— her sincerity outshone her outrageousness,

as had always been the case, even before she’d gotten sick. Cindy had always been

a bit wild—that’s what had made her so much fun when we were younger. 

I asked, “If I were you and you were me, and I asked you that question, what would

you say to me?” 

“I’d say, ‘Of course not!’” She brightened, suddenly eased. 

It felt good to be able to connect with her, even if she was here—at least she couldn’t

run away. All the fear was personified in her demons now; they were holding her

down and staring her in the face, forcing her to ask of others what was real. 

Yet I knew from before and from others’ reports, that she might dismiss me at any

moment. She could always get panicky. Perhaps it was triggered by the infamous

voices in her head, telling her to kill herself

“Hey look, I’m doing good and I’m the other half of the egg, right?” I tried. 

“Right,” she conceded. 

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“Then you must be alright too,” I reasoned. 

Cindy looked at me blankly. 

“You know, I never stopped caring about you.” I said, groping. 

“I know,” she said, as if she could forgive my superior distance while she fought her

war alone all these years. I was not satisfied. 

I could see by her puffy face and clenched jaw that she was fighting a hideous war.

She was looking into my eyes with terror.

“You’re afraid,” I, the trained therapist, acknowledged, wanting to name her feelings

for her, knowing that to admit to them would take less energy than to continue

repressing them. 

“Yes, you’d better go. I don’t feel so well. I’m sorry. I’ll talk to you when I get better,”

she pleaded. 

I felt that that could be another twenty years...or never. I had nothing to say to the

other Cindy, the one who didn’t admit to having problems, out in the real world. I had

an urgency to grab hold of her and make her safe, telling her that I would not allow

her to go through this alone any more. But she was not my child nor did she have the

trust my own child might have had. I felt helpless. 

“Why do you think you have to be all-right to be with me?” I implored, yearning for the

healing connection that we’d basked in so long ago. 

Cindy, surprised, said “That’s an interesting idea....” 

“Let me stay awhile. I don’t want to go yet. It’s good to see you.” 

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She looked at me through the eyes of a completely open and desperate person. And

yet I liked her better this way than when I’d bumped into her in the health food store

from time to time. Here, I felt free to speak my heart. Here I rejoiced in her presence,

noting the blood-red synthetic gown was ripped all the way up the leg to her hip. She

smelled and her nails were ragged.  It was great to see her. 

“I feel like I can’t talk to you when you’re out of here. You get so abrupt and

defensive. Do you know what I mean?” 

“Yes.... “ 

“Can we make a deal that if I see you and you’re that way after you leave here, that I

can say something to remind you, like ‘You’re being that way again?’ “ 

“Yes, you can say anything.” 

“I have a confession to make,” I said. “I was reading this thing about men who slight

women.... and it said that it’s not so much that they want women to feel inferior as it is

that they need to feel superior.” “That’s how I’ve been with you. “ 

I had always been afraid of turning into her. I remember when we were little and I got

lost in a department store and all I could see around me were people’s legs. Finally I

thought I spotted Cindy across the room and I started running toward her and she

started running toward me. But instead of rejoining her, I ran right into a full-length

mirror. 

“I understand why you had to stay away,” she said with real forgiveness. “ I have to

see if my menu is here,” jumping up again. 

I wanted to try not to analyze or fix her any more, but it was difficult not to want to

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cram in as much as possible. 

She came back in a hostile, changed mood, announcing abruptly, “I’m getting

sleepy.” 

“That’s O.K., let me keep you company,” I begged. 

Perhaps she was too tired or confused but whatever it was, I could breathe again

when she only lay down and dozed, opening her eyes to look at me periodically, like

a baby. Her face twisted up in pain.  “What is it?” 

“My back. “ 

“Let me rub it.” 

I rubbed her hardened muscles. She could have been very physically strong, even

for her 5’1 inches and the lithium-induced poundage. “ Can I talk?”  I asked.  “Yes.” 

“If you try to avoid the pain it makes you crazy.” 

“I know.” 

“You can’t avoid it. Stop fighting it.”

“But it hurts!” she whimpered.

“What hurts?”

“You wouldn’t understand…these… thought-forms.” She sat up and scrunched up

her face as if to avoid getting hit.

“Don’t run from it.” I pleaded.

“But it’s so awful,” she moaned.

“They get worse if you run from them,” I said. “Let me help you face it—What is it

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that’s so frightening?”

“You won’t understand.”

“What will happen if you tell me and I don’t understand?” I probed.

“I’ll be let down,” she exhaled.

“You already are let down; what have you got to lose?” I pressed. 

Cindy blurted it out, “Well, I was talking to Jeff [her partner] about expansion and

contraction, and then ...it was so awful.”  

“What was?” 

“The sensations!” 

“What sensation9” 

“Well Jeff had said ‘your sickness is like this.’  And I said, ‘you mean like moving in

and out?’ and he said, ‘exactly.’ I said, ‘forever?’ Then that’s when it got so awful!!”

Cindy started to cry. 

It was then that the image came to me. I suddenly felt completely connected to what

she was saying and feeling. 

“…like an amoeba?” 

“Yes!” 

“That goes on forever?” 

“ Yes, that’s it! “ 

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“Well, no wonder you got frightened!” I said. “What an image—of just being a

meaningless blob and never changing, never growing, what agony!” 

Cindy’s face lightened. Her eyes implored me. 

I was recalling my own childhood terror upon waking in the night, and somehow

sensing something amorphous that lay just beneath the surface of my conscious

thoughts. It had to do with existing or not existing—a fear of death perhaps, a fear of

nothingness, of going round and round and never getting anywhere… a horrible,

desperate feeling. 

“Cindy, I went through something like that.... Do you believe me?” 

‘Yes.”

“Can I keep talking to you? 

‘Please do. This is great.” 

“Let me brush your hair,” I offered. She lay back down. 

“Your hair is beautiful underneath, “ I said. “It’s just all dead and tangled on the

surface.”

“I can pin it back,” she said compliantly. 

“No, you need to get it cut. It’s not doing anything for you. It’s just old dead stuff.” 

Silence. 

“You’re beautiful,” I said softly as I brushed. 

“Thank You.” 

I moved into the rare space into which she was permitting me, “Cindy, when I did my

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ten day meditation retreat, there was one day when I really got in touch with my own

sort of craziness. It was a fear that the fear would last forever. Do you know what I

mean? That I’d never find a way out, like being trapped in a maze . I felt like I was

doing time. Do you ever feel like that?” 

“Definitely.” 

“…and that some day you’re going to be done?” 

“I don’t know.” She choked out into her pillow. 

She wasn’t sure of anything and this is what I loved so much about her. I thought

about how we had gone on different paths, mine always compelling me forward when

I’d become unbalanced in my mind, with a promise of a better future, hers apparently

threatening to last forever. I had read of concentration camp survivors who were not

ever completely  defeated psychologically, due to the importance of having a sense,

even a glimmer, of a future.

“You’d better go now, “ Cindy said.

“I don’t want to leave you.”

“I’m scared.”

“Am I scaring you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I’ll go, then .” I said.

I went out into the hall. The nurses, like everyone who notices how much we look

alike, were watching me with curiosity they couldn’t hide. I walked to the glass booth

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and opened the window.

“Can we help you?”

I implored through the tears now released, “Why does she think she has to go

through this alone?”

“Have you asked her that?” the kind faced woman asked, raising her eyebrows.

“ Sort of, “ I answered.

“Why don’t you go back in and ask her again?” she offered.

“She asked me to leave.” I said.

“She changes her mind a lot”. Encouraged, I went back in.

Cindy greeted me with an unexpected friendly, “Hi”.

“It passed” I surmised.

“Yes” 

“It always does,” I said.

“ I get frightened. “

“So do I, but that doesn’t mean you have to go it all alone.”

“Thank you.”

“I love you,” I said, and the words, for once, sounded genuine.

“I love you too….You’d better go.”

I hesitantly walked out.

“I’ll call you!” she cried after me.

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And she did, again and again, from her home, from the hospital.  But it was never

that genuine since…. Being cracked open has it’s purpose and I guess that whatever

path a person must take to get to where she is open, is somehow right in the end.  At

least, I like to think so, for if I can just make meaning out of her despair, I can try to

forget and get some sleep tonight.