I’m in the city again because Soren won’t come home anymore.
He fidgets quietly in the booth across from me, tearing apart the paper wrapping from a straw and crushing the pieces into small, hard wads. The inside of the diner is dim but familial, with cracked leather booths and walls of faded photos and strings of softly glowing Christmas lights. Even though he’s the one who picked this diner to meet at, walking distance from his new apartment, his eyes still shift quickly across the tables as though preparing for a family ambush. I sit across from him as he slices his pancake stack into meticulous cubes, an anxious habit he’s picked up over years of uncomfortable family dinners.
“And class is going well?” I ask finally.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s good. It’s fine,” he says, keeping his eyes on his breakfast.
He rubs his nose, which is straight and narrow like mine, still red from the cold. Soren and I looked so alike growing up that people assumed we were identical twins. I used to loathe this possibility, that even as a boy and a girl we could plausibly take over the other’s identity. When Soren left the church, our parents refused to speak to him for months—to either of us, really. Consciously or not, our parents have always treated Soren and I with guilt by association. If one of us broke a rule as children, the other was also open to scrutiny.
Last year was no different. At mass one day, during spring of our junior year, Soren got up and announced during prayer that he hated our church and our God for not allowing him to live as himself. Some people kind of laughed like it was a joke, but it wasn’t and when we got home our parents made Soren pack up all his things in the car that he bought with his minimum wage job. He left and never came back. They barely talked to each other. They didn’t want to talk to me.
“Why don’t you just leave, Emma?” He sighs. His turn to break the silence. “Just come stay with me. You’re almost done with school and then you can do community college in the city with me. You can stay at my place. I don’t get why you’re still there.”
“Soren, I can’t. I just can’t. I need their money for med school. I can’t live my whole life in student debt. I can’t just…do things like you can. I can’t ‘just leave’.”
He shakes his head but doesn’t speak again, stirring his Coke until the bubbles flatten. My cheeks redden, and I want to say something to ease his disfavor, but I can’t.
I’ve never been brave like Soren. In elementary school, he would race across the monkey bars blind, grabbing wildly each time for a rung that —each time—he found. that —each time—he found. When I climbed them, my eyes stayed locked on each ring, so careful to map my path, to calculate my swings. Soren has always been comfortable with the unfamiliar. He seeks no relief in the presence of a safety net.
Soren walks me to the train station after breakfast. When we were younger, people would stare
at the two of us as we passed, caught on our identical silhouettes, so similar in height and hair and sharp edges. Even now, having shed the androgyny of childhood, I sometimes feel a twinge of self-consciousness when we’re out in public together. There is an implied closeness between twins, an unspoken assumption, that theirs is a closer relationship than anybody and everything on earth. That they are bound in parallel lives together and thus develop a parallel sense of self.
But when I look down at Soren on the platform through the greasy train window, I think of nothing but how different we have always been.
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