Laraine Pinnone
Laraine Pinnone earned an MA in Creative Writing and Poetry at NYU long ago. Side-tracked by dessert, she became a Pastry Chef and then a Pastry Arts Instructor before moving to New Jersey to raise her children. After a very long hiatus, she has returned to writing, attending two great ABTP Writing workshops with Mary Brancaccio and Paul Rabinowitz and participating in the Platform Workshops and Open Mic nights.
I Am
I am watching them. A mother and son in a gluten-free cafe. She orders a chai, he just asks for water. He will only eat cooked foods and she always orders a raw salad. Looking intensely at her son; he is no longer a child, but a grown young man with some visible and invisible signs of disability——
Like the way he holds his fork in his left hand, his fingers curled about making a fist around the fork’s handle. And he has dysgraphia. I know because I’ve watched him illegibly sign his name on the check the last time they were having lunch here. Then there is the way he cringed, reflexively, when the waitperson accidentally brushed by his shoulder, signaling a Sensory Integration Disorder. Human touch still can and does repel him. She notices this too, and feels a little more motherly guilt, though that wasn’t her doing, but mine. Each day she tries to write down something good that has happened, keeping her anxiety at bay. Though, she is incurably optimistic for other people, always at the ready with a smile to help a friend or son in need.
Today, it is cool inside the cafe as the space heater here isn’t enough. She wears a thick black sweater and hugs her arms around herself in an attempt to keep a bit warmer. He is wearing a short sleeved soft tee-shirt and shorts, even though it is 37 degrees outside. I know he never feels the cold. I had watched him once back when he was a small child in winter running around barefoot in the snow and not a jacket in sight. I listen to him speaking now and detect a slight remnant of a lisp in his voice, that probably required some years of speech therapy in school. They are discussing a plan for his young adult future, moving towards some goal we all hope will be attainable.
Together, having lunch, I know them so well, but they don’t know me. Or even that I exist for certain, yet, I am. My cells inhabit both their bodies. Microchimeric, I have migrated to the tissues where I’m needed the most, to heal some areas, in detriment to others, but I am never held accountable.
He and I were monochorionic diamniotic once. And I can tell you, Hidden Twin Syndrome is real. My very pluripotent cells traveled across the placentic ocean into both of them, mother and child. While he lived in her womb, I pushed out the parts of me that could survive, then his stronger fetal cells pushed the rest of me out of a distinct existence. I don’t blame him though, there really wasn’t room in there for both of us.
Disappearing Twin Syndrome is real, too. He has missed me forever and ever, even before he was born, thoroughly sensing my existence. Then, suddenly, he was born, screaming into the world, trying to find me. Crying so loudly that the doctor had left the room quickly. Later, I had listened as that doctor apologized for abandoning them, explaining he had never heard a baby scream that loudly for so long. I knew those cries were for me.
Such screaming persisted for the first three years of my twin’s unsettled life. Our mother was the only one who could soothe him. Some of my cells, again, they’re not just potent, they’re pluripotent, had entered her brain’s neural pathways and nestled in a spot there, ensuring the security of her intense maternal devotion to my brother.
Fully grown now, he always feels he is missing someone, still looking for his phantom lost twin. I’m right here, existing my way, yet neither of them can know that for certain and they cannot see me. I just couldn’t bodily survive the first trimester, yet some of me still lives inside each of them—
Guiding their instincts and predilections, their health, and their own syndromes. I am.