A Fundamental Connection

Last night I was talking about how my sister is fundamental in my life. She is bedrock. As long as I don't go away, she'll always be there. And I have no intention of ever going away. Because I need her, I need that bedrock.

Singletons may wonder what this is like. Some singletons claim that their feelings for a sibling or parent are the same. I have two other siblings and parents, and while I do feel they are critical parts of my life, they are not essential in the same way. Well, they're not essential. I will miss them terribly, I will cry and be sad. But if my sister were to die...I don't know what will happen. I've talked to identical twins who've lost their twin, and they say it's like a part of them is gone. It's pointless in some ways to compare twin and singleton experience, it just irritates me when singletons want to claim that they know how twins feel. How on earth can they? They don't have the same experience as we do. Similarly, I don't have the same experience as a singleton. Our experiences are just different.

That said, I am amazed at the power of my connection with my sister. How much I need her. It makes some kind of sense. After all, we have been together from time zero. The only time we were separate pre-birth was when she popped out and 27 minutes later I emerged. The family joke is that I needed some space. Which I probably did, still do. Since then, we've been apart a lot, but always in contact. Probably college was the time we were most separate - the summer between sophomore and junior year was particularly distant. I spent the summer in Los Angeles with my girlfriend's family and Alana was in Brussels, Belgium and the south of France (Grasse, I believe). Our contact was quite minimal - a few letters and postcards. These were the pre-e-mail days of 1978.

That reminds me of one of the most common questions asked by singletons about twins - sometimes the very first one: "do you have telepathic communication?" We do have some psychic connection, not predictable or continuous. When one is in trouble, though, we know it. And our lives have been somewhat synchronous. Despite our best efforts to differentiate.

During our junior year, she was at Northwestern University for a semester. I was at Smith but living in a different house than in my first two years. One night I dreamed that she was in a Dali-esque set, like the dream sequence in 'North by Northwest.' She was skiing down a house roof and coming too close to the edge and falling to her death. When I woke up, I called her only to find out that the previous night, she'd been feeling quite suicidal. A friend knocked on her door and they talked, and she didn't do anything stupid. We hadn't been in much contact before that, but I knew something was wrong. For me, that is the most powerful example of the psychic connection.

Other examples are more mundane - like when we show up wearing the exact same thing, or the same color scheme. It makes some sense in that we have the same coloring and body type, so we should buy the same kinds and colors of clothes. But we have a wide variety of clothes, many colors, many styles. So how come we end up dressed virtually the same about half the time? Just one of those doo-doo-doo-doo Twilight Zone things.

Synchronicity is another story for another time.