Meera Rohit Kumbhani
A billion moons ago (the same moon), I was a prokaryote. Named “Kari Yote,” I like to think. Though, maybe not.
I lived in a dish with a million other p. karyotes. Well, one time in a dish. Another on a wooly beast’s incisor. Another inside a zebra mussel shell and another I lay encapsulated by a drop of rain that fell from as high as heaven splat onto an active grenade. Let’s see…there was the arctic ice chunk, the dead scallop, the inside of a flute, the cottonwood trees—the point is, life after life after life, I’ve stayed suction-cupped to this spinning world. Even now I stay put. Though now— miraculously and reluctantly—now I stare out the window of an 11th grade classroom. With arms. Knees. A beige tank top, a human-girl set of pubic bones. An AP Bio teacher is scatter-painting a whiteboard, trying to impart to me and twenty-eight others the phenomenon of carbon exchange.
But I’m thinking about my time in the dish.
Janina knows what I’m talking about. Janina? Yo! See her? She’s diagonally across from me. Front row, faded low rise jeans, high ponytail, and class notes that look like a Ritalin-fed fever dream. Janina knows because she was there with me. In the dish, on the scallop, in the flute. Neen! Remember when we were prokaryotes? Yo! She can’t hear my thoughts.
Back then, in the dish, you would never have recognized Janina. She had these 4 tiny little hairs coming out of her shapeless head. The cutest little curly wisps, always half-wet with plasma. The best part about them was that I had the exact same 4 tiny wisps! So exact-same that when I would use mine to tickle her awake in the mornings, she would adorably startle and say, “Oh no! I tickled myself awake again!” And all one million of us would have a great prokaryotic laugh. Neen and I were fission sisters. That’s colony talk for genetic clones. In other words, I was by myself once, stuck in a butterfly’s armpit, when I looked up at the sun and BAM, WAZOW!— my body split open. And suddenly instead of just me in a butterfly armpit, there was me and there was Janina, our matching pseudopods pressing into each other just so. She was perfect and so little. We decided on first sight that we’d never leave each other. Janina! Remember? We lived a million little lives squished membrane-to-membrane! Remember? The armpit, the dish, the walrus bone, the salt mine. The best, one, oh God! The best was the geothermal water vent, nestled in crags of a rainbow-colored spire jutting up from the ocean floor. Janina! Remember when we drank black smoke? It was so dark that time couldn’t reach us.
We pressed into each other, Janina and I—life after life. When one of us was hungry, we’d both just snip holes through our membranes and my macromolecules would flow into her and hers into me. And sometimes she’d get all my little organs and I’d say, “Oh no! I’m a water bag!” And she’d quickly throw some ribosomes and DNA my way and we’d sew back up our phospholipids and cuddle until morning. I was always half-her and half-me.
And then there were the deaths. So many deaths: the giant tongue swivel, the turtle that sat on us, the nitrogen famine. All the antibiotics. But every time it felt giddy. Right, Neen? Remember that feeling right before death? It was like the feeling right before flight. Out on the edge of nothingness. And Janina would always turn to me before it all went dark and say, “Hey bub. See you in the next round.” And we did! We always found each other. Janina! She’s so far away now, paying so much attention. She can’t hear my very loud thoughts.
And now I sit in the back row of a cube-shaped classroom with thumbs, breasts, a four-chambered heart, and sloppy posture. Listening to a teacher talk about land sediments. I can’t stop staring at Janina’s ponytail. How wondrously aligned with her vertebral column it is. There she is, front row, a fountain of keratin gushing from the top of her spine. She’s like a statue, a painting of four accidental brush strokes. I’m back here, wondering how she grew up into a painting.
Janina has a yellow shirt on today and I have a beige tank-top and the fact that beige is almost yellow but not quite seems to sit like a giant black lake etched into the distance between my chest and her back.
Our different color shirts.
Three years ago, she would have called me every morning to ask me what I’d wear. Two years ago, we napped in my bed on Saturday afternoons. Twelve months ago, she’d stop me in the hall to whisper all her problems and secrets. Half a year ago, she told me with distant eyes things like, she wants to be a better person, she doesn’t know what the point is. Twelve weeks ago, I told her she was a great person and she snapped at me for touching her arm. A month ago, she said to me in the girl’s bathroom, “You look at me like you know me. It’s creepy.” These days, I follow her endlessly to make sure she’s still there. Yesterday, she pretended not to see me in a grocery outlet parking lot.
Our different color shirts.
My freckles and curvy physique.
Her upturned lip. How good she is at sports.
My dark skin that she once said glows at night but looks dry in the sun.
Her immigrant father who still kisses her on the lips.
Her graceful, long-limbed ease.
Every time she’s laughed at her own joke and I’ve laughed too without finding it funny but for the sole possibility we might find synchronicity.
My mother who left when I was five. Her mother who has no opinions of her own.
The boys.
The Genetically Identical Boys that look at us in a million different ways. That swirl in the sway of a tide that circles me, circles her, circles us, a tide that is not liquid but is bottomless and thick and consumes without end.
Which of us gets sweatier by 3 PM?
Who had sex first?
Her name.
My name.
Encasing us both in different colored stone.
The reasons she gets mean.
The differences are galactic. Impenetrable. Thick like absence.
I might still be half you and half me I don’t know and it hurts to think about it sometimes. Everything feels heavy, Janina. My arms are dead weight when I look at you because I suddenly don’t know what they’re for.
Neen? Do you remember? When we lived in that little dish? We had the same four hairs.
The bell will ring soon and I’ll follow her again. At first she’ll look away but I’ll persist and eventually we’ll share a snack or a laugh, remembering times in this life (like when we used to poke each other in the eye when we were 6, when we held hands on a rollercoaster at 10, when we jumped into the swim lagoon at 12 and tried to find a fish to take home but only caught a soggy box of pretzels) but we won’t mention anything further back.
Our temporary polar interactions. Her eyes on the lookout for a better suited dipole.
We’ll die miles apart from each other this time, separated by fate, fortune, and time.
The world got too big, Neen.
We have legs now. To move away.
What if we don’t find each other again?
When I remember, which isn’t often, I think for just a second, for just as long as I can handle—Neen. Neen? I think—
I think we had everything back then.
Neen?
She’s so far away. She can’t hear my thoughts.
She drops a pencil. I hold my breath. One side of her body melts just enough to pick it up and so I cough. She turns: my obsession for her is a vacuum. I wink, stick my tongue out, my posture is sloppy. She looks at me, almond-shaped eyes. She doesn’t look away. The teacher talks: nutrient sinks, energy loss, lichens that feed on uranium dust. Everyone else takes notes. Someone laughs. A bird flies dangerously close to the window. Her eyes hold me and I’m suspended. The world spins and we both hold on.
She doesn’t look away.
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Meera Rohit Kumbhani (she/her) is an actor, writer, and performer. Her writing has been published in Carve Magazine, SAND, and more. As an actor, she works in television, film, and theater. She has degrees in Acting from Columbia University and in Neurobiology from UC Berkeley and lives in California with her two tiny children. Find her on twitter and Instagram at @meertastic.