Chalk and Cheese

When people hear I have a twin, they are quick to get excited. Visions of Tia and Tamera in matching outfits flash before them. Like Mary-Kate and Ashley, people think you can't have one of us without the other. I often see the twinkle (or horror) in their eyes as they picture another man walking this planet that is just like me. Someone who speaks and thinks alike, images of two Patricks finishing each other's sentences spring to mind. Then comes the interrogation, it's usually the standard variation of questions you would expect.

I'll explain that my sister and I are fraternal, and if they happened to see us side by side, they probably wouldn't think we share any genes at all. Sometimes, I'll elaborate how we almost didn't even share a birthday, considering I was breech and close to midnight literally kicked her out of the womb a month premature. But I spare them all the gory details my mother takes pride in spewing, especially the part about us being blue. I'll point out that we aren't attached at the hip.

Karen and I are completely different in every aspect. We are polar opposite down to our very souls, but somehow it works. It is possible to share a womb and have separate identities. People have a natural curiosity about twins that has been instilled to them, but anyone who knows us understands that the stigma "twins must do everything as a unit" has never really applied.

Thankfully, we were never dressed in matching dungarees or coordinating his and her jumpers, I'll forgive the year we had the same Barney lunchboxes. While I worshipped books and longed each week for the latest noughties' music releases, she was a hardcore anime fanatic and spent her mornings drawing in a sketchbook, or experimenting with watercolours. While I was researching future college courses and cramming for exams she was playing computer games and tidying up around the house, because school was never her thing and she's a much cleaner person than me. Yet we shared birthdays, first communions, and various other milestones. When I think of growing up with her, I picture two people attached with a rubber band running in opposite directions but forever bound to be together, as we were always destined to be different.

Being a twin may not be as cool as it looks, but there's a lot of benefits I appreciate too. For instance, it's comforting to know that we've never actually been alone in our entire lives. Not once. Not even at conception.

Without suffocating each other, going through the same experiences has brought us closer. In fifth class we went to the optician's and found out together that we both needed glasses. When we were seven we learned how to ride bikes together and later we grasped what exactly we could and could not get away with by learning from each other. We braced the over weight preteen era as one, and she lit a fire under my feet by walking first. She's taught me how to be a kinder, more compassionate human being and I’ve taught her all she'll ever need to know about drag queens.

I am grateful we never experienced the pressure to make us the same, something that tends to come with being a twin. One would think that being the same age relieves the competition between a younger and older sibling, but that has never been the case. Looking back we had plentiful opportunities to be individuals, with our own hopes, dreams and interests. Our parents countered the rhyming forenames phenomenon. They made the right choice, embarrassment aside I would not have made a good Darren nor Aaron. Plus, the world has suffered enough without adding another Patricia.

Today for the twenty-third time my first friend and I will celebrate the day we entered this world together, as a team.

I'll thank her for always being her because that's allowed me to be me.