Second Self, Second City
My twin and I take our professor out for a night.
Once I had a twin, a mirror. We met as adults, in a grad school classroom, and began to spiral inward— face to face, laugh to laugh— around a shared center. We started to think alike, speak the same, laugh before the joke finished. We inhabited each other’s dreams, inescapable day or night.
Was it healthy? In myth, that question doesn’t exist. It was fated, and it couldn’t have been any other way.
Or: no.
I blockaded parts of my infinite self to mirror eye to eye, self to self, throwing my whole weight against the door of all that did not match.
At the end of this story, we will take a plane at 6 am from Midway to Oakland, sitting hip to hip in the back row. There won’t be a second between sentences, from wheels up to wheels down to the Uber that unzippers us into separate apartments.
But let me start at the beginning. We were in a group chat with our professor—a woman so gorgeous, magnetic, and brilliant we worshipped her.
We were quivering with desire, with anticipation, with unease and disbelief. If she texted, there was a flurry before one responded in both voices.
A highly planned: “We’d love to.”
Or heavily workshopped: “Yes, sounds good to us.”
She told us she’d be in Chicago that June for a conference.
Chicago was a city my twin and I adored and discussed obsessively, though, truly, we discussed everything obsessively.
For months, we had been at work after class, telling her long-winded tales of the jewel of the Midwest, had done our part, full of boasts.
The seeds, trust and believe, had been planted. Four hands moving as one. Soil tilled. Watered. Fertilized.
“What a coincidence,” we replied with one mind, one pair of thumbs. “We will be there the same weekend. Can we take you out, show you around?”
We were frequently there, both had many reasons to visit, including family. It was a believable lie.
She said yes. We had one night.
We booked flights.
Before we left Oakland, one of us had a dream, a foreboding one, about the impending meeting.
The other had a different type of dream, juicy and nourishing.
Truth be told, my dream was of a distorted mirror, a self I did not recognize, a reflection that meant me ill.
And so we had argued, we were always arguing. One was always hurting the other’s feelings— the casual violence of so much closeness. We had both grown up with two sisters, in fact, were used to the grumpy grumblings of bodies that souls had dragged into such proximity, but it didn’t change the startling fact that for a moment we didn’t know if we would go on this trip. We didn’t know if we could capably co-parent this evening of mischief and mystery.
We boarded separate planes, arms crossed, huffing, landed in Chicago.
I probably don’t need to tell you this, but from the second we touched down in the Second City the plan took on its own life, unstoppably stitching through any anger and pain.
We put on our hats and sneakers and prepared to chaperone.
When I say hats and sneakers, I should say, that from our separate family’s abodes, we texted endlessly about what we should wear to appropriately set the tone. Casual, we decided. Let’s not set the stakes too high.
“Text me when you leave,” I wrote. We were two stops apart on the Red Line, planning to umbilical to the same train car.
“I’m already on,” they said. A breach in the hive-mind! I steamed, sprinting toward the station.
“You didn’t let me know in time! I won’t make it!”
“I’ll get off. We’ll get on another one together.”
Panting, red, sweating through my casual ensemble, I tap my Ventra, race down the stairs as the train pulls in.
My twin bursts from a door, yells my name! I yell my twin’s name!
We run towards each other, dive into two open doors, and embrace, breathless with joy as the momentum pushes us onwards.
We met her at the park by the river with dim sum in hand. We ate, nervously, clinking beers with each other and holding our pee. The air became charged, a storm overhead. Time for the next stop, dictated only by how adventurous she was feeling. Very!
We got on Divvy’s and biked to Pilsen, toward Skylark, the perfect dive. We shrieked in a row of three as the rain started while we ventured under the highway and past huge industrial buildings. Wet at the bar lit mostly by purple Christmas lights, we ordered Malorts and Old Styles, paid an amount of cash that the man seemed to make up on the spot.
Then another bar.
And another.
She shocked us with her stamina, her sustained desire to be out. She unwound, an evening away from being a mother.
We spun the night around her, juggling conversation, casting a spell of delight.
Back to Chinatown— a speakeasy where the bouncer flirted with her. We beamed.
A perfect night. But oh! She wasn’t done with us. Back to Skylark. We close it down. A dip into a basement aquarium bar, blue light over our three sweating faces, cocktails and one beer for the table. The bartender apologizes, it’s time for everyone to leave. Ok! Back to Chinatown. Flirty bouncer winks. They kick us out, the last people in the bar. We sit three in a row on the curb outside, slurp the leftover dim sum noodles until we’re full. Now, only now is it over.
We got in a cab with her to her Airbnb. A hug and kiss on the cheek for each of us and we left her in a haze of pride: our guest, our tourist, our professor.
We were drunk. I dragged us directly to the lake, took my clothes off and jumped in. My twin waited. I swam, the night and the water and the drinks and the city where I no longer lived.
I emerged, dripping, held my shoes by my side. We walked north, speaking unceasingly like time had no meaning. Suddenly reality intruded: the sky started to lighten.
At the onset of light our bodies wearied— heaviness replacing the glory that had brought us here. The path north was infinite. But we couldn’t stop walking now. Couldn’t stop talking if we tried.
Like any epiphany, repetition yielded revelation. We reached for each other’s hands, seeking strength, and at the touch, sunrise/lake/city/other/self became one. We stopped being two Californians on the country’s forgotten coast and became something less defined. The sun rose and consumed us, and Chicago herself nodded in approval as we blurred into her open wings.
We fell into the sunrise on the lake and were never seen again.
