The Bad Habit of Twinning

Another journal/fictionalized encounter. I really did run into those fake twins. It really did shake me up a bit. And I really was tired and probably just bullshitting.

There are typically few visual stimuli worth pursuing when waiting obediently on the correct subway platform late at night. It is a correct platform because checking twice immediately precedes a ride down the escalator that feels either a hair too long or a bit too predictable, like a painless transfer through a wormhole into a slow-motion duplicate of our world that I have undergone too many times to still be worried about any side effects.

By the time I'm on the platform pretending to check the direction of the ride once again, any residues of the misalignment of my thoughts and motion following my habitual travel across time and space have cleared up. My mind is freshly slow again. I ponder the Netzplan displayed on the wall across the rails. It resembles a thin, orange snake that has swallowed too many marbles. The names of the stations are the names of the children the marbles used to belong to, I chuckle to myself. The lights are dim, but the text is decipherable. My slow mind corrects me, unhurriedly: The text would be decipherable if I cared to put on my glasses, sitting comfortably on the bottom of my bag. Ahhh gotcha, is that why I can't make out a single word, let me try, N--I squint stupidly---gasse, two N-stations following and the shape of the next word feels familiar, from which I deduce that my upcoming approximately seven-minute ride will, once again, have no dramatic twist.

Granted that I haven't misread the clock, thinking that the train will come in four minutes instead of one, the time will eventually shuffle along in an obscure tempo, changing from presto to andante in a matter of seconds, all of which hardly bothers me as the time span allows just enough space for interesting, minuscule glitches in everyday normality to happen.

I stare straight ahead, wondering about why the noteworthy, extempore moments always happen to me on the subway. A little girl wearing a T-shirt with a large sequin heart on it passes through my visual field. Alas, my creative life has been reduced to waiting patiently on a subway platform - a punishment of years lamenting the excessive ordinariness plaguing my days. If humanity ever compiled a document titled "The Ten Commandments of Grand Expectations," composed over centuries and available in pocket editions and approximately a hundred-and-seventy-five languages, the first commandment would read, "Life will copy itself across space, for thou shall not correlate the unseen with the magnitude of thy expectation." (The remaining nine commandments have been edited massively in the past few centuries until in modern editions they were replaced completely by copies of the above mentioned first commandment. Scholars explain this phenomenon by pointing out that neither are there any other equally important rules of effective anticipation, nor has it been documented that any human ever truly learned the first one.)

But here I am, abandoned by the great minds of history, committing the same mistake as many before me, smelling the sour vapors of the underground station and amusing myself with little girls and their clothing habits. As if on cue, the same little girl passes through before my eyes again, casually sporting the same sequin heart and heading in the same direction, but this time she has visibly grown a few inches.

My mind remains similarly unhurried when it corrects me once more, sighing: Little girls don't grow a few inches in a span of fifteen seconds. I suspect you might find this in your high school biology notes. Jeez, calm down, OK?

Time for an inspection. The girls are clearly two independent human beings, I evaluate as I watch them rejoin their parents. Two pairs of hands, two pairs of feet, two neat ponytails, two sequin hearts and two pairs of shorts of the same olive green shade. The gods of symmetry were pleased today. They were, however, rather put off by the obvious inconsistencies that pop up here and there, their difference in height and age being among the especially bothersome ones. The tenets of true Gemini have been revisited by genetic specialists since the times of sleek marble bodies of Castor and Pollux, but the basic laws of perfect twins have hardly changed. The more I inspect them, the less the two girls look like identical twins even within a generous margin of error, and the more they resemble an elaborate experiment their parents resorted to after having their hopes crushed by an inevitable biological gap. Their list of priorities reads: "1. two sweet girls," "2. two naughty boys," followed by "3." and a long list of empty lines. At their age of six and four, respectively, their parents gave up on feeding up their baby girl to compensate for the height difference. One year later, a distant relative got offended by a Christmas greeting card they received from Salzburg on which the picture of the older girl was clearly photocopied and pasted over her sister's face. The parents did not leave off their efforts. They shrugged, as if helpless in their inability to tell their daughters apart. Seven years ago, precisely, we were blessed with two sweet little girls. Monozygotic twinning occurs at a constant rate of 0.3%, spread equally among all populations... I suspect, my sluggish mind whispers, their parents might find that information in their high school biology notes.

As the door closes after me and the train is set in motion, it occurs to me that perhaps the shift in time and space has caused physical matter to rearrange and discrepancies have appeared, which would make me a fool and the parents the winners of the dispute.

Perhaps one of the girls skipped down the escalator and into the open mouth of the wormhole while the other one obediently walked down the stairs, shifting one foot after the other, letting her mother squeeze her sweaty hand anxiously.

The physical dynamics, surely named after a venerable old man, force my body to press against the glass panel by the exit door. As I'm moving down the stomach of the voracious snake, I'm thinking about why my sister cancelled her visit this weekend. Maybe I should go get some sleep.