It can be said that mankind’s deepest fear, our darkest sorrow, is a small, simple thing – of dying alone, of living alone, of being alone. What is it that makes love great? Isolation.

Sometimes it feels as if I was blessed from the beginning by being free from the curse of our common birthright. I, no; no, wait, I should say ‘we’, except that it becomes difficult to think of us as two disparate beings; we, us. Twins.

Our names are Venus and Virgo.

It’s about Destiny.

Kismet, Fate, God’s Will, His Plan, Providence, the Mystery.

It’s about the reality of love grandiose and legendary. A love so great that it transforms both lovers, lifts them up and places them in the heavens, there amongst the stars.

In spite of our names, we were neither birthed in September nor ruled by Venus, although Mercury, our ruling planet, also rules Virgo. Alliteration, naturally, being preferred to aptness. Our father always believed in style over substance.

We grew up in much the same way that any little girl – born to affluent, if working class, parents; living in the big city – would. We saw enough of our parents, though both of them worked, and we were mostly brought up by our maternal grandmother. We played the piano, read Enid Blyton and scored straight As.

As we entered the teenage years, we saw less of our grandmother and more of our friends. We tried beer and hated it at fourteen, a cigarette and hated that half a year later. By sixteen we regularly enjoyed the former and couldn’t live without the surreptitious comfort of the latter.

I had girlfriends but never a best friend – that title being, naturally, preemptively and permanently taken. For the same reason, I found myself an unwilling virgin at seventeen. It was unthinkable that the one of us could do anything without the other, and not a single one of the boys I dated ever made so much as a whisper of a move. I realised, upon the morning after the morning after, that, while a threesome with twins is about the penultimate male fantasy, no boy would ever attempt anything while anyone else was around – they were embarrassed enough without further need for witnesses. It would take a man to try something as daring as that. I also realised, upon that morning, that a married man is well and good for certain things, but not the brightest of choices for anything remotely approaching the long term. I made two resolutions then – not to answer when next he paged me, and whoever was next to share my bed had first to pass a test.

All things considered, it wasn’t that much of an improvement over masturbation; which is what it is, if both of you have the same DNA.

During the years at university the test was a simple one –

“You have to tell both of us apart.”

“You mean, ‘this is you’ and ‘this is you’?” he asked us, bemused.

“You have to pass the test if you want to come in,” I replied.

“I see. But it’s not that simple, is it? I know the two of you and,” he paused as he sat down in the corridor outside our flat, “you’ll never go for something as simple as a 50-50 chance. If going in there means what I think you think it means, you wouldn’t place it on a coinflip.”

We don’t look at each other when we confer, but the signs are there, if you knew how to look; our eyes would unfocus, our faces go through minute changes of expression; a slight smile, perhaps, or the merest furrow of the eyebrows. I noticed him noticing as we sat down opposite him, the door in question looming large between my sister and me.

After a moment, I spoke, “You’re the first guy to notice that–”

“–normally they’d just try their luck,” my sister added.

“Did any of them manage it in?”

We shook our heads together.

“Did any of them get it right?”

“One did,” she held up a finger in affirmation.

“Out of three,” I clarified.

“Ahh. Do you want me to go in or don’t you? Because if you do, there shouldn’t be a test I couldn’t pass; and if you don’t, I’m perfectly happy continuing our conversation right here.”

Together, we smiled. We had barely sat down for a full minute. She unlocked the door as I spoke, “You’re right, we wouldn’t place it on a coinflip. I guess you pass.”

Sometimes it feels as if it’s silly to hang the balance of something important upon the random chance of a coinflip. Sometimes it feels as if if destiny were real, if there is anything beyond random particles going bump in the dark night of endless space, then nothing makes more sense than to base something important upon the chance of a coinflip.

You can’t force love, any more than you can force heads or tails. You can’t choose the one you love any more than you can choose the result before you flip.

If destiny existed, the coinflip isn’t random; it becomes a sign, a yes or a no spoken directly to you from God Himself, a burning bush.

We were devastated when he left; the last straw being, as he said it, the way we ganged up on him during arguments (naturally it had to be the thing he found most charming to be the most annoying). We kept to ourselves and attempted to “concentrate on our studies”. We felt miserable, rented videos starring Meg Ryan, and listened to Depeche Mode and the Gin Blossoms. But it was never that bad, because whenever I cried, there was always someone there to hold me, even if that someone was crying too.

We started looking for work before the ink had dried on the certificates certifying us as having survived education. Each of us having taken different double majors, we ended up being competent in four subjects. Not that it mattered, really, since, with the economy then being as bad as it was, being a fresh grad didn’t amount to much. And so we went for interview after interview after interview.

And then came the phonecall accepting me as Assistant Account Executive. I felt, as I hung up the phone, excited, followed by anticipation of buying new clothes (interview clothes and working clothes being totally different, naturally), and followed by the sudden and drastic shock as I realised that I would have to work alone.

We turned to look at each other as we experienced the epiphany.

“We’ve been together for so long that we’ve taken it for granted that it would always be so.”

In times of agitation, we always spoke aloud, because hearing a voice is more comforting than thinking in silence, even if the voice you heard was your own.

“Naturally, we had done things separately.”

“Naturally.”

“But we’ve never done anything on our own.”

“Anything at all. Even with separate classes, we had replaced each other–”

“–on caprice. No one could tell us apart–”

“–and either name was our name. Like hands–”

“–or at least ambidextrous ones–”

“–we are interchangeable.”

And then we decided (why not?) to alternate days. After all, we still needed to find another job, and it wasn’t as if anyone would notice.

That’d be the new test then; if he figures out we’re two.

Is it true that one man can change the world? Or is it true that the world is going to change anyway, and any man would do, as long as he is the right type of man in that place at that time? When the march of history trips, does it take a unique stone, or would any stone do? If Hitler had failed to become Hitler, would someone else have done what he did? In a different way, perhaps, but with the same result?

Did history naturally turn up a bolt called genocide, and just waited for any nut to screw it all together?

Naturally, we had found ourselves another test that couldn’t be passed. Naturally, someone had found us who made us want to forget the whole idea. That was when we realised that the test hadn’t changed; the test wasn’t for them, it was for us – if we decided that it didn’t matter if he passed or failed, then he passed.

But before that revelation he managed to come rather close –

One night, during dinner, he said to me, “You’re two people, you know that?”

I was stunned; my sister, who was crossing a road with our groceries, nearly got knocked down by a car.

He continued, “Or maybe three, in the space of one night you can go from happy to moody and back again. And you never say what you’re thinking and I have no idea if you even know that you do what you do.”

“I’m happy now,” I said, wondering if he’ll ever figure it out, and wishing he would do so soon.

You see a group of guys, say, in a pub. They’re talking and making lame jokes the way guys do, and among them is one girl sitting quietly by her boyfriend. That always offended me, in a way I couldn’t wrap words around. I didn’t think I could manage to sit still while being bored out of my skull, I didn’t think I was the sit quietly kind of girl.

One day I found myself doing exactly that. Since my boyfriend was a nerd it was sitting quietly while he was playing computer games.

Us sisters would go over to his place to study. Well, one of us would study and the other would spend time with him. That’s how a girl ends up sitting quietly; she wants to spend time with her boyfriend and he – the insensitive snot – would want to do his own thing (but then they go shopping with us, so maybe it evens out).

He would play these silly games where a bunch of nobodies would become heroes and save the entire world. The games had all these numbers to represent how the people start off as average Joes and, after long hours of playing and gaining lots and lots of points, they become these demigods who have no trouble killing monsters that a mob of average Joes couldn’t.

Part of why it’s so dumb is because he keeps replaying his saved games. It’s like Indy being killed by the big ball in the first ten minutes of the movie, and then God says “Play it again, Sam,” and the whole movie restarts and he gets another chance to avoid the big ball; except this time, he knows the big ball is there.

And he’d spend hours killing the same monster over and over because the super-magical-sword the monster carries changes each time you kill it, and he wants just that exact super-magical-sword, instead of any of the other ones. Naturally, I pointed out that if it’s random, it’s random. It’s like saying you can flip a thousand tails in a roll because every time you flip heads you can say it doesn’t count. That’s plain cheating, isn’t it?

He told me it’s a “role-playing game,” and instead of role-playing a bunch of yahoos out to save the world, he’s role-playing an extremely lucky player role-playing a bunch of yahoos out to save the world.

I told him he was crazy, but I still continued to sit quietly by.

Fortunately, I happened to be at home the first time he kissed her. Or maybe it wasn’t fortune at work; I had been pampering myself while she had been on the date. While I was reading a trashy romance novel by candlelight amid bubbles in the bath, she had probably been subconsciously sending out signals all night.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” she said, after the kiss, as she stood outside our door.

“Yes?”

I opened the door, she moved to a side, “This is my sister.”

He looked at me, then back at her. My hair was still wet, so he wasn’t seeing double. “You’re twins,” he said.

We would have rolled our eyes, but the situation was rather delicate. Naturally, he didn’t know that half the time he was with her, he was actually with me; or the other way around… but you get the idea.

“You see, we do everything together,” I said.

“Everything…?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she said.

“I did mention I had something to tell you,” I stated.

“You did? Didn’t she say…”

“That’s the thing, see? This isn’t the first time we’re meeting.”

“When we can’t do something together,” she helpfully added, “we take turns.”

“Last night, that was me,” I finished.

“Can we go in and talk about this? I think I need to sit down.”

“No,” we both replied.

“Whether or not you come in depends on how you deal with this,” I said.

“Now,” she added.

“So I’ve been going out with both you… Except I think there’s only one of you, right?”

We nodded. To his credit, and our delight, he had not taken umbrage at being lied to, nor was he overly confused with the situation; true to brilliant form, he had quickly gotten a handle on it and seemed to be more curious than anything else.

“So what do you do? Compare notes after each date?”

“We’re not just twins.”

“We’re like Siamese twins, except we share part of the same mind.”

“You’re telepathic?”

“Not really. We’re not two separate people who can talk in each other’s heads–”

“–and we’re not one mind in two bodies. It’s kind of in between.”

“What happens when you disagree?”

“We never have.”

“And never will.”

And then he smiled his peculiar smile, “So it’s sheer luck that I happened to kiss you instead of her?”

“She felt it too.”

“Not too bad,” I judged, “it doesn’t make a difference which one of us you kiss; do you see?”

“It makes a difference to me. I think it’s only fair that if I’ve been dating both of you, I’d get to kiss both of you too.”

And so he did.

They tell you that everyone is a perfect little snowflake. But you look at the shapeless blank sheep around you, with dreams no grander than to live in a bigger house and drive a faster car. Sometimes it feels as if so what if everyone is a perfect little snowflake? Only God has a microscope powerful enough to tell each of us apart.

Being what we are, we really do believe in our own perfect little snowflakiness. If life was to have any meaning at all, it had to be that we are as different as we are for a reason, a destiny above and beyond the mundane. Otherwise, what were we? The simple result of ten thousand years of evolution? Was that it? Swim in the gene pool long enough and sooner or later we’d surface? Were we just the exact permutation of a million monkeys with their typewriters?

Sometimes it feels as if if I want to believe it badly enough, it becomes true.

“That was a ‘Just So’ story–”

“–I don’t like ‘Just So’ stories.”

“Well,” he said.

“A ‘Just So’ story is when too many things ‘just so happen’. It just so happens that the bad guy runs out of bullets the moment he gets a clean shot–”

“–it just so happens that there’s always a cab when the hero absolutely needs one.”

“Ahh. And it just so happens that the bomb is disarmed just as the timer reaches one, yes?”

“Exactly. The reason Shakespeare is still relevant is because his stories never reach the ridiculously implausible. Romeo didn’t just so happen to meet Juliet, he had to be dragged to the ball.”

“But that’s just causality, isn’t it? The bad guy runs out of bullets because he had fired his entire clip, the same way Romeo had to be dragged to the ball, for some, whatever, reason. If you go back far enough, there has to be a random something somewhere. The butterfly flaps.”

“Shakespeare isn’t random.”

“What about when Romeo just so happens to run into Tybalt? Or the letter telling him of Juliet’s feigned suicide arriving just a moment too late? A second too late? The clock reaches one.”

“When Romeo kills Tybalt you feel as if if it didn’t happen then, it’d have happened later. So it’s okay that it just so happens then–”

“–When Shakespeare is random it doesn’t feel random, it feels as if something bigger is moving the pieces.”

“You just think that it’s okay if bad things just so happen, but it’s not okay if good things just so happen, because life is full of bad things just so happening but never good things, so you think it unrealistic.”

“You’re being critical–”

“–and it just so happens that someone isn’t going to be getting any tonight.”

(I was kidding, naturally.)

We talked a lot about Destiny, as we walked, along the beach, through the city; night and day; in bed, between the sheets, before and after. It felt as if the universe had been holding its breath until the moment after the moment after he said “I love you, both of you,” and smiled his peculiar smile.

It feels as if I had known him before we even met, in a past life, in my dreams, in hot humid fantasy. I told him that, and he smiled, and we talked about burning bushes and coinflips, about random chances not feeling like random chances, about how a single person can change the entire world, the way he had changed mine, completely, permanently, an indelible mark upon my singular soul in the exact shape of his lips.

Sometimes it feels as if he doesn’t believe in Destiny. No, but he does. Sometimes it feels as if he doesn’t believe that I am his destined. It feels as if he’s humouring me, that at the white-hot core of his being I wasn’t there. The other girl had come before me and he had wrote her name down on the wall in the innermost chamber of his heart, where I had thought he had written mine. Sometimes it feels as if I’m competing against an irreal girl, and it’s impossible to win because she’s not even real and faulted, the way all real things are faulted. Sometimes it feels as if I’m there only because I’m there, to pass the passing of time until she comes back to him, the way she was destined to.

It feels as if destiny is on her side.

And then he was gone.

One night, as we walked down a nameless road the way we had done so many many times before, with everything that should have been familiar being alien and different, as I hoped and hoped that he would say something that’d make it all alright, make all the fights that we’ve been having just disappear, and I wished and wished that he’d just tell me, one more time, that he loved me, both of me, inside and out. But he didn’t.

The fallout came and it was white and it was cold. We pretended to be friends and in between the how-are-you and what-did-you-do-today, curled up in bed and with the phone on my shoulder, I asked him the questions whose answers I didn’t want to know. And we never had a chance, he said, we were never meant to be, and maybe if I had come before her, things would have been different. Sometimes it feels as if there’s a different world out there, a mirror of this one irreal and faulted, and I had come into his life before she did, and it was me whom he dreamt his fevered dreams about. And then we stopped pretending.

I stopped carrying a pager a long time ago, replaced it with a cellphone more than twice the size of the model I now carry. I got another cell when I started working in different places, each phone with its own name and its own place of work and its own set of friends. He knows both numbers, because I thought it was kind of a little surprise to never know which phone he’d call next. I have a landline, and a fax machine, and email and instant messaging through the Internet, and this and that and the other. And I would never hear a word from him again, he had already deleted the entries and forgotten them, forgotten me.

And so, I, we – one of us, two of me – continue living our lives, together, alone.

Sometimes it feels.

credit where credit is due; the best story I ever read with destiny as a theme (along with the idea of the one moment that changes your life forever) is in the novel Demascus, by Richard Beard. Cutest twins I ever read are Lapis Lazuli and Lorelei Lee by Robert A. Heinlein.