We Both Wrote the Same Sentence That Night

My sister and I fell out badly and completely six years ago, the kind of rupture where you don't just stop talking, you edit each other out — no calls, no cards, a mutual, grieving silence maintained across hundreds of miles and half a decade. I thought about her constantly and contacted her never. I assume, now, that she did the same.

We reconciled last year, tentatively, and in the careful process of rebuilding we did a strange thing: we compared journals. We'd both, it turned out, kept diaries through the silent years — the same habit, inherited from the same mother, unknown to each other. And on one of our first real evenings back together, half as a peace offering and half as an experiment, we read each other bits.

On the same night — we established the date three times, because neither of us could believe it — six years into the silence, hundreds of miles apart, with no contact, we had each written the same sentence in our journals. Not a similar sentiment. The same sentence. A specific line about missing something, phrased in an identical, slightly awkward construction that neither of us would call our natural style — and containing, in the middle of it, a particular unusual word. A word our mother used, a family word, a bit of private dialect from our childhood that we had both, unknown to the other, carried into adulthood and almost never wrote or said. That word, in that sentence, in both journals, on the same night, in two different counties, in two hands that hadn't touched in six years.

We sat with our two journals open to the same date and the same line and neither of us could speak for a while. It wasn't a common phrase. It wasn't a thing you'd both independently arrive at. It was a sentence with a fingerprint on it — our mother's word — written by two estranged sisters on one night across a distance and a silence, as if some third thing, some shared root we'd both been cut from, had spoken through both our pens at once.

Our mother, I should say, was alive and well and hundreds of miles from both of us that night, and had, when we eventually and carefully asked, no memory of anything unusual, no dream, no urge to call. It wasn't her doing it deliberately. It was just that the word was hers, and we were both hers, and on that one night, in our separate silences, we both reached for the same piece of her to say the same unbearable thing, and wrote it identically, and did not know, for a year, that we had.

We're close again now. We keep our journals still. We check the dates sometimes, half-joking, half-not, to see if we've done it again. We haven't, that we know of. But we both keep writing, and we both, now, use the word on purpose.