I’m a twin. Like Remus and Romulus; Artemis and Apollo; Viola and Sebastian in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; or Tweedledee and Tweedledum, if you like, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
I’m one of those two or three percent of humans on planet Earth who has been born with their own doppelgänger. Who – if they’re an even rarer identical twin – has a genetic clone and shares 100 percent of their DNA with another person and never has to worry about finding a blood or bone-marrow match. And although we successfully divide in utero to emerge as two separate bodies and avoid the cruel fusion of Siamese twindom, we incubate from the same cellular blob as the other, nestled together nine months long in the most intimate of spaces. We walk this mortal coil[i] paired with a permanent life partner with whom we will always have more in common than with anyone else. No parent, no spouse, no non-twin sibling, no offspring, no other blood or social connection is as inextricably entwined as the double-helix twin bond.
Wonder Twins Power – Activate!
When people find out I have a twin – an identical twin sister, to boot! – it’s always the same questions: “Do you two really look exactly alike?”; “Can people tell you apart?”; “Do you dress the same?”; and “Can you two tell what the other is feeling or thinking?”
I used to laugh at that last one. Like most twins, my sister and I have shared our own unique “twin language” since infancy. But twin telepathy? I didn’t believe in that until a Sunday afternoon back in the 1990s proved that the twin phenomenon isn’t some woo-woo, “pseudomentary”-type sensationalism. That afternoon, the Universe sent us irrefutable proof that the double-helix entwinement of twins extends far past the physical.
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