Officially, I’m Ida, though Jackson has called me I as long as I can remember. The symbolism is sickening. Even in the worst of it, even in phases where I spoke almost exclusively in monosyllables and guttural sounds and sat around lost in the worn flannel shirt he left behind, I would never bring this up to anyone: and he calls me I. Like I. As in myself.

In a particularly memorable home video, shot by my father who poured his monomania exclusively into filmic evidence of our childhood for a full year before quitting pretty much entirely, Jackson and I are sitting in a sun-faded kiddie pool in my front yard, aged three and a half or four. There’s something in my hands Jackson wants but can’t have—the camera zooms and focuses—it’s a set of brightly colored rubber rings—and he looks right at the camera, at my father, at justice, and cries: I want it but I has it!

Cut to: Valentine’s Day. We are at the kitchen table, our fingers covered in glue and the filth it’s attracted, and my father has not taken pains to maintain any level of organization so that bow-tie pasta and bits of stained doily and construction paper and crayons are everywhere. Somewhere in the background you can hear Julia walking a rambunctious James around the house; she is singing “Baby Beluga” full force and he wholeheartedly despite not knowing all the words; my father tries to point the camera toward the sound but it can’t be framed and he switches it back to us.

“What,” he says, “is Valentine’s Day for?”

I ham for the camera and flirt and wiggle: “Loooove,” I say.

“And who do you love, honey,” says my father, but before I can reply Jackson butts in, his sticky fingers spread wide, grabs my face and plants that series of wet kisses only young children can, and I shriek and giggle.

“I love I!” yells Jackson. “I LOVE I.”

Cut to: a celebration ceremony at our kindergarten (the last substantial bit of video for a number of years). We have of course convinced the teachers to let us stand next to each other during the part of the “performance” where the class gets up to sing the alphabet. To his credit, my father covers all four rows of children, with the same historian penchant for accuracy and entirety I’ve inherited, before settling on the two of us. The many weak voices lilt and strain, and when it gets to “f,” you can see our faces widen and bodies tense.

“E, f, g”—Jackson and I look at each other—“h,” and then we positively explode as we scream our initials—“I J”—so much so that neither of us has energy for “k”; we’ve been holding our breath in our ambitious bodies for those two syllables the whole time, and we both sort of slump and stumble, and the shy boy in the tie next to us frowns at how we’re embarrassing him.

The majority of our lives we were an exhausting display that others looked on, confused and ashamed to be watching. I, at least, was happy to bear witness. But even one letter changes a meaning entirely; no matter their proximity, different points of an alphabet refuse to be represented as the same: there’s no guarantee that someone standing at precisely the same longitude and latitude as you will remember the view the same way, no promise that one person’s memory of a moment or a month will parallel yours, retain the same value, shape the years of living that follow.