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Gone | Apr 04 2002

I was gone for six years. To the ones I had left, I could have been dead, they did not know, for I did not speak to them. When I came back at last, one of my sibs, a girl, was no longer a girl but grown. It was like a time, long past, in which a girl who played a girl on a show—a show of six sibs in a bunch—was gone one day and a new girl took her place. None of the sibs looked at the new girl as though she was strange to them. And that was strange. I would sit and watch and think, “Don’t they see that she is strange?” But if she seemed strange to them, none showed it.

My own sib gave me pics of her in the years I had missed. I put them down so that each year was next to the next, as the years had come. The first pic was from when she was girl and I was still with her. The last was from the day I came back. I would look at the pics from one to the next and try to grasp how this could be. But I could not. To me my sib was gone, and this new girl, a grown one, had come in her place.