Double Life
Image courtesy of Brent Ninaber.
... to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it… the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us farther away.
From “Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs” S. Maan (2015)
When I was five, I met my doppleganger. She had my name, my blond hair, and my tumbling way of speaking. We had birthdays two weeks apart and celebrated them half-together for ten years, until, between her fifteenth birthday and mine, she told me she never wanted to talk to me again.
Every year, her party was the same except for the candles on the cake and the color of our hair, which faded darker. We ate potato chips slick with grease and missed every shot we tried to make through the basketball hoop in her backyard. We pretended we were fairies, or, when we grew too old for that, we wore bubblegum lip gloss while trading truths and dares. We tested how curse words tasted curled on the edges of our tongues.
One of my first memories: we are sitting on a porch, dangling our legs off. It’s a soft, velvet night, and we’re nursing identical sunburns. I call her my best friend for the first time.
Another: we’re sitting in the field, tearing grass with our fingers. It’s gym class and we’re supposed to be running around the track. We’re talking about shaving our legs. The fascinating conversation topics of middle school girls.
Or this one: we’re older now, and in running shorts. She’s watching me jump over hurdles on the track. I dragged her here to practice for the Tuesday meet. She watches as my left foot catches and I slam my knee into the concrete, watches as I cradle the raw red bulb of my scraped knee. Fuck, I scream. My mouth is gaping and hers is closed in a small, flat line. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
When I was eight or nine, I went to camp and wouldn’t stop talking about Ella. Telling all my new friends how much I loved her. What she liked and didn’t. What she thought about the world.
It was a week and a half before I realized they thought I had been talking about myself the whole time.
I dream about her often. It was one of those dreams, actually, that made me start writing about her again. I’d given up after failed attempt after failed attempt. But I couldn’t—I can’t—get this dream out of my head. In it, she wasn’t herself. She was taller; her teeth were whiter. Her dress was blue, the same color of the shampoo bottles in her upstairs bathroom. There were people all around her, and she beckoned me toward them, smiling at me. We were shrouded by light.
As Ella and I grew up, we developed personalities like we were picking from the same pool of traits, and there was only one copy of each. She got to be kind, quiet, and afraid of the dark. I was funny, loud, and could only sleep when she turned off her nightlight. We decided sometime along the way that I was the pretty one. It wasn’t about our faces, exactly, or our bodies. It had to do with the way we walked in and out of rooms (me: quickly, her: slowly), who was better at piano (always her), and how our voices moved through sentences, whether they went up or down.
By the time we got to high school, our identities had solidified and split, each carefully molded against the other.
Our freshman year, I bleached my hair until it broke halfway to the root and finally learned how to swear. Among juniors and seniors with kool-aid colored bangs, I hinted at having done drugs I’d only read about. In the bathroom next to the cafeteria, I kissed girls I didn’t like. In the library, I had panic attacks and didn’t care who saw.
I wore red lipstick everyday and sometimes it traveled onto the tip of my chin or got stuck in the jagged edge of my front tooth. When the other Ella threatened to betray our cover, I rolled my eyes. We’re cool now, I said. No one needs to know the nerds we used to be.
Our freshman year, she had a girlfriend she met through me. She met most people through me. As the year got colder, I grew closer with the girlfriend than Ella, though this arguably had more to do with the complicated and vaguely mythological dissolution of our doubles-tie than with anything interesting about the girlfriend.
The girlfriend told me about the breakup before it happened. I nodded along, and swore myself to secrecy. A few days after they broke up, the girlfriend took me outside. She told me she was in love with me. We were sitting on a bench. It was March, and the wind still felt like winter. Cold sweat collected under my arms, as I told the girlfriend I could not talk about this with her. She should not be saying such things to me. She must be confused which Ella was which.
Because I was 14, or because I was cruel, or because the bleach in my hair had traveled up into my brain and poisoned all of the brain cells responsible for common sense, that wasn’t the end of it. See, the girlfriend, whose name was Sarah, had given me this idea that I could be loved. I turned the idea over and over in my mouth like a hard candy.[1] When the cherry candy melted into a tiny nub on my tongue, I convinced myself I loved Sarah. It was April, and warmer than it had been.
One day, I walked with the girlfriend and her best friend through town. There were cherry blossoms everywhere, pink and white like an eye’s burst vein. We took hundreds of pictures of each other, and I looked ugly in all of them. My hair was bright yellow and greasy, revealing my guilt.
That night, the girlfriend and I went to my basement and lit many candles. We watched The Virgin Suicides. We sat so close to one another and said stupid things like “I think we should try it. But we shouldn’t tell Ella until we know we have something.” We kissed over and over while Kirsten Dunst and her sisters withered away. Our braces touched.
Like many poets, I take bits of scientific information that interest me and ignore the rest. This was something that always annoyed Ella. In this case, what interests me is entropy. Or, as Yeats put it, the idea that, despite our best efforts, things fall apart.
I had texted Ella about Sarah a week before our fifteenth birthdays, confessing everything. I don’t remember what I said. It was something dramatic about true love and friendship and how I was finally, finally happy. Which I wasn’t. Not that I was lying; I stopped being able to tell the difference between good and bad feelings that year, so numb and violently optimistic, having panic attacks in the car on the way to class, and losing ten pounds from stress. During midterms my bleached hair began to shed. I lost friends like dead skin.
Ella texted me back a few hours later. She was fine with it, she said. I could do what I wanted.
I remember math class—a cherry necklace around my neck, given to me by the girlfriend. Ella asked where I got it and I told her. I pretended innocence as she went quiet; I pretended innocence as she ran to the bathroom to hyperventilate, but a familiar tightness filled my chest, a phantom ache.
The day after that she texted me and said she changed her mind. She wanted me to break it off with Sarah, so I did. But whatever had been ruined already was. I had merged us too far into each other, and had taken too much of her for myself.
I know the whole story is embarrassing. It places us in time and age, like carbon-dating something to measure the decay. A page of papyrus, maybe. Or a note passed in class, a lipgloss, the roach of a poorly rolled joint. We weren’t mystical doubles, we were just fifteen.
Or maybe we were both. In my dreams about Ella, her face ripples as if reflected in running water. Her nose turns into my nose, her eyes blink and change color. We blend in and out of each other, one Ella starting wherever the other ends.
The summer after we stopped being friends, I texted her. I wrote this long, half-bullshit message.[2] It said something like “I hope you don’t hate me,” and she responded with something like “Well, I do.” After reading it, I threw up in my mouth.
A month later, I moved continents.[3] For the last month of summer, I was alone in our new apartment. This is what I remember. I read Roland Barthes’ Fragments d’un Discours Amoureux and cried through it.[4] I wanted to tell her about it, but I told my mom instead.
We didn’t have air conditioning, and I was dizzy all the time. The dog was homesick and whined if we left without her, and we had to retrain her in the horrible heat while our landlord left threats about noise complaints. I choked on water in our new shower, gasping I’m sorry, water going up my nose and into my throat.
I read “The Second Coming” for the first time that summer, and it stuck in my head all the way until September. Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Far away, Ella stopped responding to my texts.
John Herwitz, professor of neuroscience, who teaches Introduction to Brain and Behavior on Tuesdays and Thursdays, is still friendly with Joseph White, professor of neuroscience, who teaches Introduction to the Brain and Behavior on Mondays and Wednesdays. John and Joe talk sometimes about their daughters, Ella and Ella, strange smart girls, who had a falling out neither man likes to reference much. Sometimes, John Herwitz goes home and tells his Ella news about Joe’s Ella. She holds it to her like a scrap of sand she can turn into a pearl.
The latest piece of news: Joe’s Ella wants to go to college in Canada. I don’t know what to do with this information. I look up universities in the various provinces and try to figure out which ones she’s interested in. It turns out Canada has a lot of universities.
I imagine her trudging through the snow. A sweet little scowl on her face.
In my dream about Ella, I don’t know what I looked like. It didn’t matter, see. It was all her: white teeth, light draped over her like a wedding shroud. I barely had a body at all.
1. Specifically, like the cherry candies Ella had given me a season prior. They’re what I always imagine when I write that simile in first draft after first draft. They were a gift she’d gotten me on a trip down South. We got each other gifts each time we traveled. Little tokens of remembering.
2. I typed it out lying on the stairs of my house. Ella and I used to hang out on them, sprawling ourselves out like cats. It’s where we went to play “imagination,” where we’d tell stories for hours, weaving our sentences in and out of each others’.
3. We moved back a year later. When I came back, I started over as if freshman year had never happened. I had a new language fresh on my tongue, a chain smoking habit I had recently quit, and new friends I’d had to move away from. When I saw Ella in the halls, we didn’t meet each others’ eyes.
4. A book about love, told in fragments. A quote: je t’adore parce que tu es adorable, je t’aime parce que je t’aime. I wanted to be loved like that.