Pure amnesia. Whatever part of my brain decided which memories should stick said this one would not, and I didn’t even know what I sat there thinking of until the old couple, kind faces, found me two hours later.

My sister is gone. I think she left. I don’t know my way back. I believed it. My sister is gone and I can’t find her. I wasn’t lying. I believed it.

The only thing left is her phone that she dropped, that teetered close to the ravine that I had tossed back on to the trail.

‘Glass Daughter’ twirls from it, quietly –

I realize that I’m drowning (so this is what it feels like).

They can’t find her. They look and they look but there are no search parties down there, where she fell; too steep, too thick, too wooded. The rain would’ve washed away any footprints.

Can’t find her.

Left her phone? Why would she leave her phone?

Can’t find her.

I know where she is. She’s still there.

I know where the fuck she is because I left her there.

my lungs are boiling

Booker says they left her there –

float float ellis taught me to float

Gasp. Gasp. No air just water in my throat and eyes, and everything is black and Roxy is singing –

eyes stare

oh when a million eyes stare

who is the woman the sister the girl they see there

who is the face on display

not me not mine no no no. they don’t see me, someone else completely – a girl who has not done these things; a girl who is smart and maybe distant but good, who wants to create something instead of taking life, but

this whole time she’s repenting for the worst thing she ever did

she wants to be so good, so smart Dad will forget about the whole thing, but

a liar can’t trust anyone not even other liars

she can’t let anyone close because if they stare straight into her eyes

they’ll know she’s a murderer.

do you get to glance at heaven before the descent? because there it is

Heaven is Ellis and Peyton and me on the boardwalk with nothing better to do, young and alive and full of feeling and time, heaven is Ellis and me bobbing in the inky water, heaven is trust, is trusting the strangers for no good reason, trusting they’ll love you, trusting when you open your mouth and your eyes wide like a reckoning that they’ll see the black that blooms there but keep on loving you, despite what you carry, and you regret everything.

Clarity arrives, white and beating.

Who was Mary Anne sending messages to?

The woman at the docks, in the dark, sneaking through the dense of the trees. We saw her. Ellis and I. I’d thought it was Celeste.