- I have a fraternal twin sister, and we lived together for the first 22 years of our lives.
- After college, we went our separate ways, and I learned how to occupy the world as just me.
As first graders, my twin sister and I would pass each other in the classroom and brush pinkies.
It's not something I remember, but it was no surprise when my mom told us of our strange but cute semi-regular ritual. When you share a womb and then spend the years following sleeping less than five feet from them, a slight graze of the hand can be a life-or-death emotional recharge.
Or so it felt that way at 7 years old.
As we grew older, we started not getting along
My sister, Kate, and I are fraternal twins. Born one minute apart, Kate has a lifelong love for sparkles and is the hardest worker you'll ever meet. My favorite place is to be wrapped up in a blanket.
Our shared egolessness and drive in school made sharing a life easy. We had the same friends, generally the same taste in music, and until college, we had most of our classes together.
At home, we were only ever a few feet apart, whether sleeping on our bunk bed or crunching away at homework in our fluorescent green room that grew to be littered with Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber posters. Here, we decompressed from late-night sleepovers with neighborhood kids, the trials and tribulations of middle school, and the exhaustive loop of high school. Solitude and relaxation, together.
But our room could also be a war zone. Day-to-day offenses included me not moving quickly enough in the morning and Kate forgetting to turn her alarm off while in the shower while I finished sleeping. With adolescence came more and more bickering, but our mom learned not to act as a peace facilitator. Attempts to settle foolish fights would only result in us turning on her and defending one another.
After college we were finally on our own
Living within several feet of another person for approximately two decades, squabbles escalated into semi-regular, heated, 99.9% verbal fights. We were armed with a lifetime of intimate knowledge about the other, making it easy to whip up a heartbreaking insult at lightning speed. Loaded with irrational fury over whose turn it was to use the car or saying hello while the other studied, we were impulsive with our anger. The occasional oral slap was, to this day, unrepeatable.
"I can't wait to not live with you anymore" became a regular dig by our last two years of college when our beds sat side-by-side, two feet apart.
Two months after college, I had my own space for the first time in my life: a makeshift bedroom in the living room of a two-bedroom apartment. It felt like peace reincarnated.
While I settled in Los Angeles, Kate returned to our college town, Phoenix, where she earned a job as a pediatric oncologist nurse. In different parts of the Western United States, we personalized our rooms as we pleased. We also learned to speak in "I's" and "me's" instead of "we's."
Before this, we had never been apart for more than a few days. Twenty-two years old, and each of us had only ever existed as a duo. As I learned how to occupy space in the world as a singular individual, I jumped around Los Angeles between customer service jobs and music writing gigs in an effort to grow a writing career. About a year into being a concert reviewer for a small entertainment blog, the chest tightness I experienced when heading solo to a show became a thing of the past. It also dawned on me that for people to know you, for people to see you, you have to let them. You have to show them.
After two years in Phoenix, Kate returned to our Southern California hometown, and now we are only 45 minutes to two hours apart, depending on traffic. The occasional bickering is inevitable, but so is our approach to walk through life, always leading with empathy — a habit subconsciously developed by living side by side with your diametric opposite since exiting the womb.
And I don't think we'll ever live together again. But being with one another, in any space, always feels like home.