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Tinwé found her sister tucked inside of the small alcove formed by the roots of their home tree. Her sister's face was flushed with emotion and wet with tears, and she was hugging her knees to her chest.
"There you are," Tinwé said, squeezing in beside Lithop and pulling her bony knees to her own chest. Her sister felt warm beside her, and this close Tinwé could see that the tears were still coming, making tracks down Lithop's face, which was dirty from playing outside all day. "What's wrong?"
Lithop sniffed and rubbed at her eyes with her sleeve. They were in their pink shirts today, with the little beetles and berries that their father had embroidered at the neckline and along the hems. Tinwé frowned to see the pretty embroidery dirtied further.
"I don't want to sing," Lithop said thickly.
"Why not?" Tinwé asked, confused. "You did so good. Mother and Father liked your singing so much."
"I did good before," Lithop sniffled again, "but what if I can't do good again? What if I try to sing in front of all the people but I can't sing anymore?"
Tinwé and Lithop were six-years-old, and Tinwé was beginning to understand that everyone else felt things that she didn't.
As an infant Tinwé had been placid and no trouble at all. Lithop had been a lively baby with a strong, healthy wail that could bring their parents to their wits end in no time. In contrast, Tinwé only cried during rare instances of pain. She was often still and quiet, and seemed quite content to watch the world with those large, solidly black eyes.
As they grew into small children, it seemed to Tinwé that Lithop didn't go a day without bursting into tears, and the source of these tears was ever a mystery to Tinwé. Lately she was learning that words could hurt people, and that they could continue to hurt after they had been spoken, like how her fingers kept smarting after she had touched the hot oven. She was learning that these concepts that felt so abstract to her—happiness, sadness, fear, love—were very real to her parents and to her sister. They all felt these things inside of them, inciting them to laughter, tears, anxiety, affection.
Mother had recently explained it to Tinwé by telling her that every person had a little world inside of them. A person's inner world was a garden of thoughts and memories, and their feelings were like a swarm of bumblebees, sometimes warm and fuzzy and sometimes stinging.
Thinking of those bees, Tinwé turned her body so that she could wrap her sister in a hug in hopes of quieting the buzz. Tinwe's pale little arms were cool around Lithop, and the right kind of tight. Tinwé could feel Lithop's wet hiccups against her neck, and she made the soothing sounds that she had heard the adults direct to crying children before.
Tinwe did not have those bees inside. Once she had felt the heart-racing-stomach-turning rush of adrenaline, when a cranky owlbear had come crashing through the trees and reared up on the trail ahead of her family. She enjoyed the sensations of soft fabric and Father’s cool jewelry against her fingertips, and she longed for the wisdom contained inside of the books on Mother’s shelves, for she had only begun to learn to read. She wanted things. She thought that she liked and disliked things. But she didn’t feel the way others did, and when she did feel something it felt distant, vague.
When she was a little older, Tinwé decided that if everyone else has a colourful garden and a swarm of bees inside of them, what she had inside of her was the evening sky. Cold open air, passed over by the rare wisp of emotion too far off to grasp. Each of her thoughts was a little point of cold light, and the moon? The moon was her sister, bright and constant even in its inconsistency.
But that understanding of her inner world would come later. Now, she was six-years-old, and Lithop was crying for reasons she couldn’t begin to understand, and she was rubbing circles onto her sister's back in the way that Father did and having three thoughts in quick succession.
I will never fully understand Lithop, and she will never really understand me.
I am always going to be different than everyone else, even my twin sister.
But that’s okay. It's okay because I don’t cry or get scared, and that means that Lithop needs me. If I can help Lithop, then she will always want to have me around, and I will always have someone bigger and stronger than me to protect me.
That last thought was the most important. Mother and Father often said that if their girls were together then they would always be alright. Tinwé believed this to be true, but perhaps it was even better than that. If she and her sister were always together, they might be able to do anything. They could have adventures like the ones illustrated in Mother’s books.
She would help Lithop stop crying and trick her into being brave. Lithop could carry her when Tinwé got too tired and the sun was too bright and hot, and fight off that bully Oleander when she started pinching Tinwé and calling her caivo. They would only ever need each other, and one day they would be old enough to do whatever they wanted.
Eventually, Lithop stopped crying. For now, at least, Tinwé thought, as she eyed how utterly filthy Lithop's sleeves were now. Tinwé used her own neat sleeve to dry Lithop’s pink cheeks.
“I love you, Tinnie.” Lithop smiled at her sister.
“I love you, too,” Tinwé decided, and that was it. Once Tinwé got it in her head to do something she stuck with it, and so she would love Lithop for the rest of her life. That was just her way.