By Sara Pirkle
I was six years old the first time I realized my twin and I were separate people. We were standing at the edge of a duck pond, fishing stale bread from a cellophane bag, tearing the heels into chunks, and tossing them to the ducks. Watching my small hands dive into the bag while her identical hands emerged, I had a thought too abstract for my first-grade brain to comprehend: What if I was supposed to be her and she was supposed to be me? It was as if our parents had flipped a coin to decide which one of us was Amy, and which was Sara. That night in our shared double-bed, listening to her breathing, I tried to grasp the concept that she was a distinct individual, different from me, navigating a maze of dreams I was not having while I stared at the dimpled plaster ceiling, unable to sleep.
That was the first of countless instances over the next thirty years in which, confident I was walking on solid ground, out of nowhere, I misstepped and tumbled down the rabbit hole of contemplating my existence. When I was a child, the existential spiral might be triggered by hearing Amy whistle or watching her draw a cartoon bear and wondering why my mouth and fingers couldn’t do the same thing. As I became an adult, my most intense moments of self-reflection have often been provoked by the simple question Amy and I have heard more than any other: “What’s it like being a twin?”
The easy response, and the one we usually give when people ask, is “What’s it like not being a twin?” We often say it in unison, then we laugh, as if we’re still surprised when we say the same thing at the same time. But I always worry that we sound as interchangeable as parrots in a pet store. I wonder if fraternal twins are asked that question as often as we are.
I understand why people are curious. Since the year Amy and I were born, the birth rate of identical twins has held steady at about 3 out of every 1000 births. So, it’s still pretty rare to go through life with what essentially amounts to a clone. But when singletons ask what it’s like to be a twin, they seem to expect a one-sentence summary of a relationship that, even after decades of experience, I don’t fully understand. They walk away from an encounter with the Pirkle twins satisfied (and maybe slightly envious) by our cheerful reassurance that life is great as a twin. But I’m left wanting to chase after the person, force him or her to sit and listen to me lecture ad nauseum about the benefits and the pitfalls of twindom, the joy and heartbreak of sharing a life from conception with another person. Last summer at a party, a friend of ours who had grown up as an only child proclaimed that Amy and I had “won the genetic jackpot” and watching us finish each other’s sentences made her ache for what she didn’t have.
The older I’ve gotten, the harder it is for me to explain the complex latticework of our experiences, choices, ideas, and personalities. Like most aspects of life, a person can’t truly understand what it is like to be a twin unless she has lived it, but I want to give more than the one-sentence lighthearted answer. When someone asks me in casual conversation to comment on the most defining characteristic of my sense of self, I want to say:
I know the dark night and sunlight of being an identical twin.
I know the You can’t wear that, it’s mine fight that is not about sharing clothes but about sharing identities.
I know the pain of liking the same boy, wondering, What will I do if he chooses me? What will I do if he chooses her?
I know the morning phone call of Are you okay? Did he hurt you? Tell me everything. I’ll kill him. The late-night call of How could you? You know better. I’ll never tell, I swear.
I remember the squealing tires of our boxy Dodge Aries peeling through the high school parking lot, back when we were desperate to get away from the town where everyone confused us, where the choir director at the First Baptist Church put us in the front center because we matched.
Being a twin is being half a person one day and two whole people the next.
It’s being called the wrong name my whole life, even by my grandparents. Even by my parents.
Once or twice, I’ve even referred to myself as Amy, or called her Sara.
It’s looking through stacks of photographs and wondering which child is me. Here, we’re wearing the same red and gold tutus, the same white tights, the same sequined crowns. We’re holding hands, our pink cheeks like matching plums.
As a toddler, I talked to a mirror, calling my reflection my twin’s name and wondering why she wasn’t answering my questions, just saying the same words at the same time. I would see myself in time-out and cry because it was not me, it was my sister, and I didn’t understand. So much of my childhood was like wandering through a dream, holding hands with myself and not having control of where this other version of myself was guiding me. I followed and trusted she knew what she was doing, but how could she? She was the exact age I was.
Being a twin is saying, I want to write, so you can’t. It’s saying, I want to paint. Don’t you ever take an art class.
Being a twin is taking turns letting each other win. It’s the imperceptible nod across a game of Hearts that says, I’ll cover you this hand.
It’s the choreography in her kitchen our first morning together after six weeks apart, a dance without speaking. It’s knowing who pours the water, measures the coffee grinds, removes cream from the fridge, pulls mugs from the cabinets, tears the Sweet’N Low packets, grabs the toast from the toaster, spreads jam. It is moving in and out of each other’s space, under an arm, behind a back, the synchronized swim routine of making breakfast, and the man sitting at the table watching, sleep still crusted in his eye, strokes his beard and says, “How long did it take you to practice that?” And in unison we say, “A lifetime,” when really, we mean, None of this is rehearsed. It just happens.
Being a twin is knowing to leave the room in college so she can kiss a boy in private, but even in the hallway I feel like I’m being kissed too.
It’s stumbling to the elevator after teaching three English classes in a row, confused for a moment why I feel so drunk, then calling her. She’s dancing by an old-fashioned jukebox in a bar nine states away. I know she’s had four whiskeys before she admits it. I say, “Sit down. I need to drive home,” and I can tell the moment she sits because my world steadies itself.
It’s knowing I can lie to everyone but her.
Being a twin is spending a lifetime craving my own space, then being terrified when I have it. One night, sitting in a roughed-up armchair in an empty cabin in North Georgia, I added the miles between us and realized that if I got into my car right that moment and started driving, I still wouldn’t be where she was by breakfast. That night, I faced the darkest fear of all, the one I never voice but carry inside always, that more than fearing my own death, I fear hers. I know it will happen one day, but I don’t know how I could breathe without her.
While she is alive, while she is setting metal type, loving a man with her body, stirring supper on the stove, laughing at her pet turtle jumping from his stone to his pond, I am whole. If she is moving through her life, I can move through mine, no matter the miles between us. I am never alone. I feel her anger when she fights with her husband. I suffer headaches for a week when shingles blaze along her hairline. When her car breaks down on the side of the road three hundred miles away, I leap from my couch and pace the room, suddenly overwhelmed by anxiety.
I welcome the anger, the suffering, the apprehension that isn’t mine. What I don’t ever want is the phantom limb pain of no one on the other side. Being a twin is that awful, unfair burden of confronting not one death but two.
When I was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer at thirty-three, I understood with painful clarity that I was not guaranteed decades more of life. Mingled with that brutal awareness was the relief that I was the one with cancer, not her. The diagnosis seemed to solidify the odds that I would die first, that birth into death, the birth we won’t share. She would have to face the hurt of being left behind, and I wouldn’t. For a moment I believed I had won the bitter coin toss. Then, the instinct to survive kicked in, and I felt rage—not that I had cancer but the rage that accompanies truly comprehending I was born as half of something that cannot last, no matter how desperately I try to hold onto it. That truth is unbearable: one day, one of us will be alone.
It’s a unique fear, one that singles may have trouble understanding. Imagine a version of yourself strolling beside you your whole life, mirroring your laughs, your milestones, your discoveries, your griefs. Then imagine losing that person. Imagine looking in a casket and seeing yourself. Imagine passing a reflective surface, catching a glimpse of her, briefly forgetting she’s not alive. Imagine the jolt when you remember the truth. Imagine the somber expressions of the people who loved you both, who see her face every time they look at yours. Imagine being a living ghost. How could I put her through that? How could she do that to me?
When I was going through chemo, Amy lived 250 miles away, but she would make the 9-hour round trip drive for each treatment. I had to fight myself to sleep some nights, feeling in those last dark hours before the next day how unfair it is to be human, to endure the human condition, the awareness of an endpoint. I would sob in the bed, jealous of my healthy twin who was lying beside me, rubbing my back, telling me to breathe. What I couldn’t say but was always thinking: I wasn’t just facing my own death; I was facing hers.
When twins share everything, including grief, how does the unlucky twin even survive that kind of loss? Before my cancer diagnosis, I rarely thought about one of us dying before the other. Spending the better part of a year traveling back and forth to a chemo ward changed that perspective. Once I completed treatment, I decided I wasn’t going to live without her anymore. We had spent our entire adult lives living in different states. I quit my job for a lower paycheck at her university, moved across state lines and into her home, and got a new slew of doctors in her town. I’m happier than I’ve been in a decade, but I’m plagued with thoughts of seeing her suffer the same disease. Because we are identical, she is at a significantly greater risk of getting cancer since I had it.
Every time Amy accompanied me to chemo, the nurses would smile and say, “You’re so lucky to have each other.” We always nodded and agreed, never saying aloud what is too painful even to write. For all the joy and fulfillment that our relationship brings, in one very specific way, it’s misery. Being a twin is a cruel coin toss and not knowing what to call. Heads, I die first. Tails, I die twice.