I asked my sister her thoughts on being twins, and she responded with a quote from her favorite book, Into the Wild: “Happiness is only real when shared.”
On a rainy Sunday in October, I entered this world at 3:05pm as a shriveled purple baby with bright orange hair. My twin sister joined me at 3:06pm—blonde—yet equally shriveled, thus ending my reign as an only child.
While my parents had names picked out before our births, they waited until they saw our faces before assigning them to us. I resemble my father, so I got the name from his side of the family: Betty Tarlton Williams, my paternal grandmother’s name in full. I go by Tallie as a nickname. My sister takes after my mom, so that’s who she’s named after; my mom is Kimberly Michelle Williams, and my sister is Kimberly Paige Williams. They both go by their middle names.
A few days later, Paige and I were strapped into the car and taken home from the hospital. For the next eighteen years, not a day would be spent apart.
As a result, I probably use the word “our” more than most people. I also refer to myself as “us” a lot. “We” makes frequent appearances in my vernacular. The fact of the matter is almost every experience I could refer to up until the point when we separated for college was shared by another person: my twin.
It’s really interesting to have pretty much the exact same memories as someone else. For starters, it’s nice to have someone who can remember even the most niche of childhood references, or having someone to ask when you can’t remember what happened in a particular moment. Every happy memory has someone to share it with, and the load of the sad ones is shared across four shoulders instead of two.
That’s not to say our lives were exactly the same. First of all, that would be nearly impossible. Second, my sister and I experience the world in very different ways. We are a classic representation of our star sign, the Libra, also known as the scales. I’m sensitive, introspective, and geared towards anxiety; Paige doesn’t care what people think about her; she’s outgoing and could make friends with a speck of dust if she had to.
Because of this, it’s almost like our lived experiences are a stripe of acrylic paint, while our interpretations of them are transposed above in watercolor.
Our differences are what we attribute our closeness to. We don’t compete over interests, and we look so different we can’t really compete there, either. We fit together like a key in a lock.
We often joke that when we’re hanging out just the two of us, we tend to forget that we’re with another person; as a twin, it’s easy to feel like the other is just an extension of your own consciousness; that’s how deeply ingrained we are.
Despite our differences, as twins we of course share many things, especially during those days in our youth when we were always together. We typically shared a best friend, and the closet was always “our” closet; we even shared a bedroom until we were in our late teens. Most notably, of course, we share a birthday. It’s always “our” birthday is coming up, “our” birthday cake, and “our” candles to make wishes upon.
The only time I had my “own” birthday was in college. That is where our differences really started to show. She went to school in snowy, isolated upstate New York for a physics degree; I went to school in sunny, suburban Richmond for a degree in English literature. This is also the only time we have ever had separate groups of friends. For the first time, we made our own memories. For the first time, we weren’t a package deal; I was Tallie, and she was Paige.
This experience was crucial to our development as separate people. Have you ever heard of the creepy twins who come to college together, take all the same classes, and push their dorm beds into one? Yeah, I hate to say it, but that probably would have been us had we not taken the time to grow as individuals, rather than two parts of a whole.
After college, we of course came back together. We have lived together for the last three years, and while we are less codependent than we were pre-college, I will allow the fact that we have been known to spend considerable amounts of time on the phone from our respective rooms.
What can we say? We’re twins!
I cannot remember a time in my life when Paige wasn’t there. I genuinely have no idea what it would be like to not have that one person to share everything with.
I was alone in this world for one minute. Since then, I have never been truly by myself; just Paige’s existence means that I am never alone, no matter the geographical distance that separates us. Now, I live in fear of that minute. A single minute without my twin on this Earth is my worst nightmare, and I hope to never experience it.
