Twins

There are a lot of “twinned’’ things in this world; cupboards, rings and keys. But usually when you mention to somebody the word ‘‘twin’’, they think of twin brothers.

That’s what Tommy and I are.

Tommy and me. Me and Tommy. That’s how it has always been and that’s how it’ll always be.

We’re homozygotes twins, identical in every single way. That’s mainly because we were born in the same instant, our heads, smaller than other babies heads, went through our mother’s uterus at the same time, not one second apart, so no-one knew who was the first and who the second. 

We liked it that way.

We liked being equal, the same, not different.

The good thing about having a twin is that there’s always someone there for you, no matter what. Our friends could have never understood what it was like for us, they could 

have never felt the bond between our blood.

Anyway, after our birth , doctors checked us and saw that every cell of our body was identical, there wasn’t one that was different from our twin’s. 

Basically, we were clones.

They wanted to take us into a laboratory to study us, but our mother didn’t let them, so our life has always been perfectly normal. In fact, we’ve always tried to make it more exiting.

For example, on our first day of primary school we dressed with identical clothes, so that our teacher would always get confused when we switched places. When we were caught our mother punished us by making us re-paint the walls of the kitchen. Only that we didn’t do it properly and Tommy ended up breaking the chandelier because he swung from it saying that he was angel that had come to rescue us from our ‘‘paint-duty’’.

When we were five, we were racing on our road, when Tommy tripped and fell, he bruised his knees and when my Mum came to see what had happened and saw his knee, she looked at me like I had made him trip. 

I still remember that look in her eyes, and I wasn’t going to understand it until many years later.

Of course Tommy isn’t my only brother; although we are the eldest of all the kids our parents had. We also have a sister, two years younger than us and two little brothers. One three years younger than us and one five years younger than us. Their names are 

Jackie, Gale and Sam.

Our favourite is Sam, or Sammy, as we call him. He’s so cute with his blonde hair and blue eyes and he’s  funny too. Jackie is a pest and she always will be; while Gale is the nerd of the family. 

Thing is, I’ve never actually bonded with my other siblings as much as I have with Tommy. I’ve always felt like an outsider with them.   

I’m going to talk about a few people that really inspired me at school and made understand who I really was.

The first is one of my oldest friends. Thing is, she almost always lived in her own world. One day she came over and told me her theory about tests and interrogations. For her at the start of the year we were all on a plane and then when one of us was interrogated in class, he had to jump out of the plane and, depending on which grade they got their parachute opened well (or not!). Then when we had a test we were all back on a plane and when we all jumped out, the ones who had been interrogated had two parachutes so, even if their test parachute didn’t open so well, their interrogation parachute would save them, but for the ones who hadn’t been interrogated the only had one shot for the parachute to open if not they would be dead.

Another one of her metaphors would be about the ways to do something, for example she would say that clever people would just whisk the components with an electric whisk, meanwhile dumb people would just mix huge lumps of butter and flour with an old-fashioned whisk.

One funny thing about her was how every time we had an English class she sharpened her pencil and opened a book and started to do her funny drawings on the poor book.

I’m mentioning her because she is one of the people who inspired me to discover who I really am and to be myself and not to be afraid to say that. And not to always be the same as my twin. If we lok identical, doesn't always mean that we have to think the same things!!!

The second person I want to mention is my English teacher from secondary school, she was crazy all her ways of saying and making fun of herself and I loved that about her and nobody teased her about it . What she taught me was to believe in my potential and push further until I reached something deep in my writing and this has really helped me with my career today.

                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Well, the biggest change between mine and Tommy’s relationship was in fact in secondary school. That’s when social status started to matter and people started to talk to you (or not to talk to you) just if you had a certain status.

Even if we both had trouble fitting in at first, I soon met a popular girl and we started dating. So I was soon entered in the gossip circle, but Tommy didn’t and all those years we spent in high-school I always felt some guilt down my throat when I was striding down the hall with the popular kids and seeing Tommy all alone by his locker watching me with different eyes from the ones I knew.  

Just to note, this work is entirely fictional, any refer to actual facts is pure coincidence.
S.V.