The evening had never tasted so sweetly chemical. Our heady, drunken heartbeats throbbed in time to Robin's war song, our voices braiding together, the sound lighting a signal in the sky. Her fragile eyelids wrinkled with the effort of her scream, and the stars had never looked so sharp, nor as bright.

Why was this not strange to me? You might think I would sometimes wonder. Robin and I tore through adolescence, leaving behind a glittering trail of rotting rainbows, morbid metaphors and abandoned projects. Together we spoke a strange, synesthetic language that few others, if any, could comprehend. The world in which we lived was possessed of a ghastly, elegant sense of drama and we fancied ourselves responsible for recording every moment of agonizing beauty that we witnessed. We also accepted, even relished the residual fact that we were also tremendously foolish children. Laughter would seize us and refuse to let go, spasms of lunatic delight holding our lungs hostage. We had not fear nor shame when we were together- we were fiercer, louder, stronger as one voice. We were irreconcilably joined, Siamese hearts.

I loved her madly, in every sense of the word. I had no doubt that she felt the same- feels the same to this day. We both will, always, in the way that twin sisters can never truly exist separately, rather holding some glistening thread over whatever impossible distance. Even when fate drew us towards opposite poles, I would remain profoundly aware that there was a quiet, acerbic peroxide blonde waiting for me in New York. Writing her blistering, brilliant poetry on Saturday mornings, perched on top of the coin operated laundry machine, combat boots dangling, just the way she had imagined herself. Likewise, she would know that I was constantly collecting stories and things of beauty for her, that by night I sent her secret messages across the same sky we had set on fire on that rooftop when we were young.

In the four years we spent apart, I watched myself stretch and distend in the mirror, my limbs growing lean and fluid, my jaw line losing its soft curve. Victim of a sparse diet of black coffee, my body rebelled against the childlike aesthetic I strove toward in high school, legs lengthening into those of a woman's, no longer interested in masquerading as a nymphet. Through photographs and occasional, treasured visits, I saw that she too was undergoing a kindred metamorphosis, her delicate mouth blossoming into a lush, metal-studded pout, her flesh in bloom with the designs which I had drawn for her. Adulthood took our bodies by storm, and life took whatever other liberties it wished in changing us when we weren't looking. Those four years sculpted us, it might seem, beyond recognition.

But the stars still scar the sky when our voices lace into one, hers like cutting, icy birdsong, mine like ragged, bloodstained velvet. Her fingers attack the chalk white keys of her piano, both tearing the chords from the instrument and seducing them while I slam my song into the microphone, our sounds tangling into a blinding light. In these moments we are sixteen again, shouting from the rooftops- and the planets and streetlights all burn together in one continuous, searing symphony.