For The Twin
The difference between us is clear. And yet, we’re so close. So close that we picked up the twee nickname of twins like some kind of infection, and I have saved you under this name on my phone so that when you call those letters jump up. ‘Twin’ appearing out of nowhere, straight bold lines against the black phone screen etching out the bond that we both feel. It’s like chainmail and though it looks light, it’s strong. Twins. Though the same blood does not run through our capillaries as it does with a usual set, there is a naturalness to our relationship that defies this lack of requirement.
Your efficiency was obvious when we first met and started working together. There were tasks that you got straight away that left me with a furrowed brow and a hotness creeping up my cheek. Whereas yours remained cool, unscathed at being ‘asked to do something you didn’t know how’. Our separate ways of tackling organisation also set us apart. You come at it with a clear cut purpose which is to just get it done in the easiest way possible, and my ideas flip around like acrobats in the sky, finally finishing their set, breathless and realising that the flips and jumps they have been doing were not the easiest way forward. Now years on and having both left the workplace that we met at, on my first day of unemployment, fresh-faced and revealing in the chance to wear a denim dress on a Monday day time, you called me to see ‘how I was’. Naturally, you couldn’t speak for long in a workday. The signal was fleeting because you were about to get in a lift to attend a meeting that I have no doubt you will have brought a necessary structure to, and I was walking along the pavement drinking an iced coffee in the sun.
So, here we are now. The two of us, two twins with our different skill sets. Our tool belts are weighted with opposing talents and yet we wear them standing stoically next to each other. You sent me your CV so I could copy the format and put in the subject heading ‘here you go wanka’.
We were discussing CVs in your flat, last Friday morning, and we recite how you sent me yours initially.
You say ‘yes didn’t I call me a pillock in the email?’
I correct you looking at my new short hair cut in your blank tv screen, watching myself and convinced I need to lose weight from my face for the style to suit me properly.
‘No you called me a wanker in the subject headline. You said ‘here you go wanka’’, and you laugh and turn around back to the grill and ask me how many sausages I want in my sandwich on the year’s first actually cold morning.
You complain momentarily about a relationship with your sibling, and say how her over emotional state is laborious and then site an incident that happened recently where she was smarting from something between a misunderstanding and an argument, that you saw as nothing. I nodded joining you in laughter at her tantrum but also knowing that had it between the two of us, I would be the one doing the same as your sibling, lumbered by ‘emotional intelligence’. You are becoming unsure about work. Now high up a ladder and wondering if you want to continue on the same one. I listen, intently, lovingly knowing exactly the asset that you are to any team and jump forwards protectively with all the suggestions that I have in my armoury of how to deal with the company’s blindness at not seeing this. At the same time, I share my own grievances and that I lost my nipple piercing in the morning, and I’m now in some kind of race against my flesh to get to ‘Wicked Ways’ parlour before the piercing closes up.
Every time you turn around I look down into my top, frowning at my empty nipple and apologising to it for all this fuss, and at the same time listening to my twin’s talk of pay rises, and earning, and should we sit at the table to eat?
