twins.

Tonight I sent my lover home in a panic. I mean I was panicking because it happened again. It happens all the time. This thing I can't explain to anyone except for my twin sister- this thing where I really don't know where I begin and another person ends and when I look at them I think they are me talking, moving through the apartment, laughing. I really look at them and experience them as me. I don't know how else to explain it. It's scary and feels something like the beginning of a bad trip.

It's because I am an identical twin. Since conception I have been with someone else. As soon as my eyes developed I was looking into someone else's eyes and identifying with them, feeling them, knowing them as myself. So, my boundaries easily dissolve when I am with someone for a long period of time. They dissolve into an almost psychotic feeling of being the other person. You see, my twin Nina and I are not only twins, we are extremely sensitive people and extremely close. And how do you define a person? DNA + experience + what? A soul? If that is the equation of a person, Nina and I definitely blur the lines of that already slippery definition because our DNA is identical, well like 99.9 % identical- our experiences are very similar, almost identical during our formative years when we were just inseperable, always connected and touching in every family photograph- because, then we just knew, I mean, we just were something like a planaria worm that had existed once as one body and then was cut in half and regenerated into two bodies, but the bodies are identical in composition and experience and always touching- so, yeah, we are two different people, but are we? Really?

If Nina died, I would immediately commit suicide. I am not being dramatic. I think of Nina dying every day and cry and almost puke about it. It is my greatest fear. Torture me, kill me by firing squad, let me hang on the tree branch being eaten by termites with a monster below me and a tiger above, just please, don't ever take Nina away from me, God, Jesus, Mary, please, don't. It is her worst fear as well. Eating the other day in Whole Foods I made her laugh and we laughed like only we can and we both stopped and knew what the other was thinking and we put our hands together and promised each other that if one of us should die, the other had to live on and be happy, had to. We promised each other. But we both know if one died it's over. When... I mean... one of us will before the other... ok.... I cannot even go there.

So Piaget, was it Piaget, well, someone said that children exist in a very self absorbed phase until about, I don't know, five or six. Until then if you ask them to make themselves invisible, they will cover their eyes because they just don't understand that others really exist. This is the theory. Their world is naturally and innocently self-absorbed. Mine was not. I always knew someone else existed. Through knowing she existed and feeling complete empathy (that word isn't even adequate) with her, I learned early to experience it with all people and animals and even, yes, inanimate objects. Being a twin is so amazing I could write volumes on the experiences we have shared, the psyhic connections, the secret languages, the never being lonely growing up, always having a playmate, always having someone have my back- the way this threatened everyone around us, made people jealous and freaked out so much I wasn't surprised when I learned years later that in many cultures twins are either deified or considered to be curses. They just confuse the human mind and nowhere is this more confusing than when the twin grows up and tries to be in a relationship with another.

I could write a lot about how being a twin is a curse. Worrying about another person as if they are yourself, as if you are walking around in another body out in the world and you have no control what that body does to itself, if it gets hurt by someone else- you are hurt. If it gets in trouble, you are in trouble. This creates a lot of instability in identity and also a strength and feeling of connectedness totally unequaled in all of human experience.

But- the way my boundaries dissolve so easily in love is a big problem. It doesn't always happen, but when it does, it really creates problems. It can create, at first, the most intense intimacy the other person has ever felt, but soon, no one can live up to my standard of closeness- the standard I have lived with naturally and easily since CONCEPTION. I am always trying to replace my twin because I just cannot be without that kind of closeness. Don't get me wrong, I love solitude. I spent a lot of time by myself- that is something twinnie-hood (as we call it) also creates, a hyper need for individual identity, but in relationships I must know every thing my lover is thinking, feeling, and it can't wait- I must know it instantly or I feel very uncomfortable, on foreign ground with an unknown language, and I just can't read their minds as easily as I can hers, so I ask a lot of questions and probe and watch, constantly watching and this makes my lovers uncomfortable and exposed.

Then the break-up. It's like in the movie Avatar when they connect those living tendrils with the tendrils in the animal they are flying- I connect like that and once I do, breaking up is catastrophic for me. It feels like death for everyone, but for me it's like... I DON'T EVEN KNOW.

This was all written really quickly and out of nothing. I need to read books about twin psychology. I need to figure out a way to understand it and control it.

I am at once extremely individual and extremely empathic. It's hard and I am constantly at war inside about whether to let go and connect or to hold on to my boundaries for dear life.

People say "Every man is born and dies alone," as if it is an essential truth of nature, but it isn't- for twins it just isn't. Well, for no one really cause you are always surrounded and embedded and enmeshed with life everlasting all around you-inside your mother's body, full of microorganisms, surrounded by life, even in death, but yeah, for twins, that shit really isn't true.

That's probably why I hate the word codependency so much. People have applied it to my relationships in the past and I am like, NO! I AM JUST A TWIN! This is the language we speak in the land we come from. This is just the way it always was. I don't know where you end and I begin. It's the mystical union everyone strives for, but when it happens, it's scary.

Once Nina and I were tape-recording us just being twins, being silly, laughing and talking and I said, Nina, if you ever got cancer or something, I would have the doctors inject me with some kind of disease at a rate where I would deteriorate and die at exactly the same time you did so our souls would just reunite at the moment of death above our bodies by whatever powerful force which brought us together in the first place. I was very sincere and ready to cry. Silence on the tape. Nina is thinking. She then says, "Wait a minute- why when you talk about this am I always the one dying? Maybe YOU gonna die, mafucka." Maybe you had to be there or be us, but it was pretty funny.