Christmas Twins

Matching snowmen robes.

Plush.

Plush robes are not for wrapping inside of after a shower. They are not for drying. They cannot Absorb. They are for warming or for Posing In.

Twin cousins in snowmen plush robes. Robes thickly over clothes, over daytime clothes in the morning. Christmas Morning. Cousins, girls, not the same age, not having the same appearance, but with twin kindred souls. Christmas souls. Twin cousins in snowmen plush robes with their arms around each other in the photograph. Looking at the picture-taker and Posing. Smiling at the photograph, years later, all the time after, smirking at those snowmen. Twin Teenage cousins with a Boyfriend or Boyfriendless in plush robes on Christmas morning with arms around each other. They are swimming in the robes like pajama royalty, one Twin Cousin with straight white teeth and a kid tan from living in California. The other Twin Cousin with kid Bangs and borrowed clothing. Twins because they are Cousins because they are In Photographs together inside the world like a secret. Girls.

Snowmen.

Snowpeople.

Snowgirls.

Snowgirls in snowrobes, Posing as teenagers Holding On to each other in a twinly kindred way of looking out at things.

Of loving things.

Of wearing gifts.

Girls wearing gifts of a changing, falling-down-and-falling-up-all-around, mind-whirring, eccentric Growing Up.

Twin Cousins, twin snowpeople. Together.

An inherited, made-up Growing Up.

Perhaps apart. California being one Separator of Twin Cousins.

But always with the memory of snowmen robes wrapping them up in a Plush Swimming in the middle of Christmas in the daytime. Twin Souls. Not dry, not wet. A Growing Up snowgirl part of a Family. A kind of Always, twirling and diverging and flowing in the middle part of souls. Percolating on and Posing In, cyclic, during Christmas.

Courtney Burnett