I Live in the Body of My Twin

Originally Published in Moss Puppy Magazine, Issue 4: Caged, Spring 2023

I live in the body of my twin. I see through her eyes, hear through her ears. I feel the shudder of her heart as her hand is brushed, perhaps even intentionally, by the boy she secretly loves. The world is transmitted through her skin, and all her senses, to fill my darkness with the light of her experience. Everything comes with the constant noise of her flowing blood, her beating heart. And it is always like a lullaby; like our mother’s voice, singing us to sleep. 

I live in darkness but my life is rich, richer, maybe, even than hers. When in my mind I leap, there is no gravity inhibiting my ascent. When I feel color, I am not limited to the properties of light. My thoughts are free and I don’t have to put them aside to go to work, or take out the garbage, or count to ten in French. 

My life began as a tragedy. I was the victim; forgotten, invisible, consumed. I felt the world around me grow, felt my sister make our mother’s belly bulge. I had to rely on my inner sense, my spark of consciousness, I think I will call it. My development stopped before I formed, so no eyes or ears or little feet wriggling in the fluid darkness. I was happy to contribute to my sister’s progress; she bounced and turned and sucked her toes. She kicked and gurgled and made our parents giddy with anticipation of what she would become; what color eyes? (hazel), would she have hair? (she didn’t), would she be round, and squishy, and smell like rain? (she was, and she did). 

It’s a puzzle to me how I’ve come to communicate these things. These are my thoughts, but in actuality, I don’t really know what it is I am exactly. I am sort of everywhere within her but my thoughts are mine alone. So there are things I do not question, things I am better off not trying to understand.

I am not sure of my gender, though I am probably most inclined toward the feminine. I’ve never really thought about it but I’m trying to imagine what it might be, or would have been. It is hard enough to imagine that I have a consciousness at all, or am able to live and have individual thoughts even though I have no discernable form of my own. 

Sometimes I daydream what it would be like to have more control over my life. I imagine having arms and legs. I imagine running and being out of breath. I imagine my skin, coated with the salty residue of the ocean, warm and burning under the hot summer sun. I wonder what would be my favorite things...I have so much time to wonder in the dark solitude of my existence.

When my sister dreams; we are together. I enter her thoughts; and in her sleep, she sees me and knows that I am real. This keeps me going; to live my life, as it were. For me, it is a connection to what is real, to what I know, and live, always. But it is out of reach; except in the brief hours of her slumber. 

My sister’s name is Emily. In her dreams, she calls me Sarah. She was named for Emily Dickinson (or that is what I’ve decided) who wrote, among other things:

“The soul has moments of escape –

 When bursting all the doors –

 She dances like a Bomb, abroad,

 And swings upon the Hours…”

I am really nothing but this soul; with moments of escape into my sister's world. But what, when she dies...if she is gone where will I go? What will become of me, of us? We all will go eventually; all of course, but me. I am here perpetually, stuck in the liminal; the in-between. Maybe it is here, in this perpetual slumber, that we will be together forever.

Perhaps I am here simply to wait for her, to ensure that she is never alone; for what fate would be worse than that? I can’t bear the idea of loneliness; it fills me with despair to imagine this crush of solitude upon anyone other than me. It is mine to absorb, mine to mind the hours so that others do not have to.

I do not ask for much, I am happy for my lot. I try not to think about the alternative and am filled with gratitude every day for who or what granted me this reprieve. I feel that I am obliged to believe the things I am speaking of. Why grant me this awareness if there was nothing to be done with it? 

My sister tells me she is sorry. It is the first thing she says to me every time we meet. I think it takes me a full hour each night to cheer her up and make her forget the burden that she carries; the burden (not true) of responsibility for my transience. 

But once she forgets…

Once she forgets, she takes me to such brilliant places. She makes me feel what it is to be alive, to have substance and senses that engage the world around me. For a few hours each night I am whole and I begin to feel the slow ache of growing up. 

One night she told me of a time when she was five (when we were five). She had crawled beneath the house with a boy. They stayed there all afternoon in the pitch-black darkness, with little things crawling between their toes as they burrowed their bare feet into the soft, cool, dirt. In that darkness she was like me, the sounds of the pipes banging and flowing with water-like the sounds of her heartbeat, her flowing blood. And all throughout that afternoon, above them, out in the light, his mother and ours, frantic and wailing, imploring the police and firemen to come find their vanished children. My sister and her friend emerged into that brilliant, frantic light; to be loved and smothered amid a residue of dread that would never again abate. 

I love that story and tell it to myself (mimicking my sister’s voice) to pass the hours before her eyes shut and sleep overtakes her. I imagine that I am there with them; the three of us; bodies hunched in that tiny space beneath the world. I would hold my sister’s hand in the darkness and we would whisper secrets before the world and all its worries finds us and takes us back. 

I wonder sometimes if my sister might ever hear me even when she is awake. This is a fantasy that has been growing in me but I am not sure I want to risk having this hope taken from me if I find that it cannot be.  So I try to stay quiet when she is awake, I try not to agitate her cells or senses or remind her in any way that I am here. I am mostly successful but there are moments when I slip; when she is startled by a noise or a thought, or a feeling that seems to come from nowhere. 

For all my contentment, I must admit that this sequestered life in the sanctuary of my sister’s body has, in spite of my best intentions, left me wrestling with a petulance and immaturity that I fear may be released against my better judgment. Sometimes I envy her. Sometimes I wish it were me who had filled our mother’s belly with my possibility, my body, my future. When I have these thoughts, I punish myself by not visiting my sister in her dreams. On these nights she wakes, her sheets drenched with the flood of my tears, seeping through every pore of her skin. 

I have come to understand that I have developed with a duel and often conflicting sense of identity and that my understanding of other people’s experience is not as far along as it could be. I possess a sort of double vision; I see and feel what my sister does but it is blurred with my own interpretation. I worry that I see everything with too strong a bias and that I will never really know anything but this self-interpreted world. I have learned to compensate but I suspect that often I have seen and felt something other than what was actually there. But I suppose, also, that this is likely everyone’s experience to a degree. Even you, I think, are imagining and interpreting my story through the filter of your own understanding. 

What must you be thinking of me already by now? Oh my gosh, and I haven’t even come to the difficult things. Now I am blushing, I am pink as the insides of my sister's cheeks. I shouldn’t ask you to play along, I am only hoping that you have already begun to form an image of me in your mind and I shouldn’t intrude on your imagination. I am guilty of that already and I am torn and tortured by what that has wrought. 

I often lose track of time. For me, time is not a line but rather, more like a smear on a slide. I adjust the magnification of my memory to take me here or there, back and forth. There are so many ways to look at the same thing; so many layers, that I could never count them all or fully recollect their proper order. 

I like to think I am the lucky one, and with the exception of those rare moments where my questions and curiosity weaken me to the temptations of envy, I am secure in this assessment. Aside from my initial disappointment regarding my lot, I have only had to witness and comfort my sister through those crushing misfortunes that come simply as a condition of entering the corporeal world.

My sister once came across the word “agency” in a dictionary. It means one’s capacity to act in any given situation. It made me wonder if I had anything to do with what would become of me. Did I will this? Was I the agent of my own destiny? So much to think about and I think this is the best possible outcome, my best possible condition; even when I compare it to the wonder and excitement I feel when my sister tells me stories in her dreams. I am an observer, I take things in and my inner world sustains me and makes me bigger inside. 

My sister read the dictionary often. She took it to bed to help her sleep. And each night the last word she read would float into her dreams where it would wait for me to retrieve it and add it to my growing vocabulary. These words gave my world shape and dimension; they built my reality. I am a product of my environment, or rather my environment is the perch from which I navigate and know the world. My world grows in expanding circles. If you could slice through me it would look like the rings of a tree. 

My sister no longer dreams. I miss her so much, but it has allowed me the time to reassess my place, reconsider my contentment. Really, this is a contemplation set in motion in a more impulsive moment. 

Once…

I discovered something.

I learned that I could reach her even when she wasn’t sleeping. This was a revelation, a miracle; a wish unexpectedly fulfilled. 

Suddenly, everything changed. At first, I noticed that she would hesitate, just briefly, when I had a thought about something she was doing; maybe just a pause, but sometimes she would change her mind or contradict herself mid-sentence in a conversation. Soon, I found I could directly alter her behavior. I was like a voice whispering in her ear; I was like her conscience. She would talk to herself, not realizing it was me she was talking and responding to. At first, I wanted more, I wanted her to know it was me, but I soon came to appreciate this anonymity. 

Opportunity had come to me, but really, it was my hard work and focus that woke it up. I was becoming free. My sister’s body-our body- was finally being shared equitably with me. I was getting my turn. 

I had no idea then what was to come from this.

I no longer passed my time meditating to the sounds and shivers of her body as I waited for night to come. My gaze became always outward, and I no longer needed to wait for the somnambulistic recounting of my sister’s days. More and more I took control of our body, our eyes, our actions; my desire and pleasure overtook hers. I am the stronger one, I always was. It was not an accident that the burden of internment was placed on me.

Did I love my sister, even through all of this?

Perhaps I am guilty of self-absorption, perhaps this is the theme with which I will always be identified, but I wonder; if a tree's root breaks through the sidewalk—if it reaches out for nourishment, causing all sorts of damage and upheaval in the process, is the sapling that sprouts from that root guilty of the damage? How culpable can we be if it is our nature that compels us? 

But this is a reverie that could send me down a path I may not want to take...but maybe just a couple steps, a concession to my curiosity.

What is my nature? I have been incubated in darkness and it is her light that occasionally breaks through the long, black course of my existence. I am like that snake in the terrarium at the back of her classroom. When a mouse enters his environment, he does what is compelled by his nature. He does not mourn the death of his dinner, he simply satisfies his hunger and ensures his continued existence. Am I like this? Am I so innocent in my essence? I do mourn but I go on eating anyway, I continue to consume and fill myself up. There is so much to know, so much to experience. How can anyone blame me for my appetite?

I have so much time to think. Every thought is a spotlight in the darkness. Nothing for me can be saved for later or overlooked and sometimes the richness of what is illuminated overwhelms me. My senses are always focused, I can’t soften the impact of an experience by distracting myself to something else; there is nothing else but what is in the circle of that light. 

I am a snake, a black hole, a monster.

I am an aberration, a freak, a mistake...

But in my sister’s dreams, I am beautiful; 

and until recently, I believed it too. 

I still want to believe, but there is so much telling me it can’t be true. 

I have no face to show the world, no persona to hide behind. My image cannot hold my place or impact a first impression, or win people over with my welcoming smile or excellent posture. I am like a live wire with no casing, or a tiger imagining a cage but with no bars to separate you from my hunger. I am all desire. I have no corporeal form to temper or distract my appetite. I am having difficulty controlling myself and I am racked with guilt over the consequence of my weakness. 

I need to refocus; time is a concern, and I want to confess all I can before we leave here for good. 

Here is another by Emily Dickinson: 

“Because I could not stop for Death – 

 He kindly stopped for me –  

 The Carriage held but just Ourselves –  

 And Immortality…”

I think my sister read her more for me than for herself. I think she was trying to comfort me; telling me there were others like me. Maybe they appeared to have a choice, but just like me, they (and Emily Dickinson) really had none. 

This was my sister’s kindness. It was always in her nature to comfort others. This was the first thing that occurred to her. Before her own needs it was the needs of others. We have such a complex relationship, she and I. I don’t know which of us is the greater part. Is anything ever equal? Doesn’t someone always take the lead? Doesn’t someone always have to make the hard decisions? 

My sister has dreams other than those she shares with me. She dreams of changing the world. She thinks everyone is a miracle; that god has a plan for us all. What would the world look like if my sister had her way? It would be beautiful; more beautiful than I can imagine. My sister feels the sadness of the world.

And another that comes to mind as I think about where all of this is going:

“The Soul has Bandaged moments –

 When too appalled to stir –

 She feels some ghastly Fright come up

 And stop to look at her –”

When my sister was nine she had a bad dream. When she had nightmares, she wouldn’t let me in, she shut all the doors and pushed the furniture against them from the inside; anything, she thought, to spare me from the fear she knew was coming. She thought she could protect me, thought she could shelter me from her own darkness. But she and I shared more than just the cells that made up our flesh. Our souls and our psyches were folded together, like a batter, or a universe of infinite, overlapping possibilities. I saw what she saw, felt her terror and her helpless despair. I experienced it and filed it away like all the other knowledge I acquired. I was only an observer while she absorbed everything, and the terror grew with her like teeth or hair or fresh, new skin.— The nightmare my sister had when she was nine made her feel that maybe she was not good after all. She feared that no matter what she did, she would not shake the demons clinging to her limbs and whispering in her ears. She woke up determined to be good in spite of this, but she did so with a heaviness that accepted that she, herself, was doomed.

We are so hard on ourselves. Maybe for me, it was different; I had to face my predicament in every moment, without respite. My options were limited, so I had to make the best. My sister had a whole world to measure her shortcomings. How could her heart possibly be big enough to contain it all? I am not heartless, but also, I have no heart, per se. As long as she will be, I will be. As long as her heart beats, I will exist. I owe everything to her and I want to take away her anguish.

I have a story of my own. It is my earliest memory. I recall the moment my future shifted. I felt my cells rearranging themselves to be in service of my sister’s future instead. It is a one-dimensional memory—I had yet to form an identity. But it is a moment in which I feel I had a choice, but even then in my nascent state, I chose to accept my purpose. 

But I have come to know that purpose is a dynamic thing. How was I to fully understand then what I was choosing, or how all this would turn out? I am confident in my choices, I have had so much time to ponder it, to be sure. 

My sister suffers. Her thoughts and her pain pass through me and are embedded in me; as I am embedded in her. I feel the strain on her heart, the darkness filling the spaces once replete with joy. It was all too much for her. It is possible the wrong one of us was chosen to become whole. I felt the ache of her sadness. The departure of her spirit. I sensed our body reacting to the amplitude of her helplessness. 

I love my sister. In her dreams, we are whole and happy. We are connected as we should have been in life, but were not, could not. Nature got it wrong, god was distracted or indifferent and it is my responsibility to make things right. 

I whisper in my sister’s ear, distract her for a moment. I feel the impact as her body buckles and her breathing slows. I hear the wails of passers-by, the sirens coming for her in the distance. 

At the far end of a meadow, I see my sister walking towards me. She is radiant; she is light as air. I have taken away her burden and we are here, together forever in this perpetual dream. The sound of her heartbeat has been replaced by the whirring of machines keeping her body alive. She comes closer and our fingers interlock. 

This is how it was always meant to be.

And I am happy.

I am loved.

I am complete.