#about us.

I think maybe I should not see this as divided as it is. It certainly isn't to my twin, who's always been able to move fluidly from one role to the other and could not understand why I hesitate and put so much weight on keeping us simple and what we are "pure". To him, life is in the moments, less in a narrative: he sees life in a way that to me appears chaotic, rootless, and difficult to follow. To maybe simplify and keep it neutral - I'll picture him with one of his favourites, a woman in this case to take out of the equation all the societal issues regarding appropriate conduct between men and women, and focusing solely on a simple view of how he seems to function, socially speaking, on a different ruleset than most.

In one moment, they are something like friends. Let's place them at a banquet: she is entertaining him, telling a good joke. Her status does not matter to him, nor the context of their relationship beyond that he knows her and trusts her. She makes him laugh, and so, they are friends. In bed, there is little association to that role. Sex is an action to him more than anything else: an isolated event where he's focused on the fun of it, the pleasure of the body, the excitement of arousal and stimulation. The person he's with matters less than the activity itself. After sex is the time he might mix these worlds more than anywhere else: the evidence, physical and mental, is still there for what has been done, but the feeling is more akin to a late-night sit-in, where they'll talk and laugh and have wine again, and eat.

The next day she's combing his hair, and he will not be thinking of their sex together, or her jokes at the banquet table. He's likely not paying much attention to her at all. He might be focused on me, or instructing someone else. She is thin air to him.

These are separate spaces for him, and with separate spaces come separation of the person also. He moves from these roles and moves everyone else along with him to different roles alongside him.

And I have never known how not to carry every one with me. I feel like where I weave rope from my memories, he serves his own like treats laid out on plates, and picks whichever he prefers and which suits the occasion. Sweet when he craves it, salty when it fits him better.

I see our lives two ways: in some lives, like the one where we, at our cores, came from, we were one way. In other lives, we were different. These lives are equal but to me they have distinct flavours, they're separate as if by a wall, two parallel threads which are spun from the same wool. One is red, the other is purple. One is stark and present and the other subdued and deep.

A year ago, my brother found this distinction that I drew between these lives an ache and a need that could not be reconciled. In rejecting the other as not a part of myself, I was rejecting a part of him as someone I did not want to know or love or even meet. But he had already met him and I never knew that. In our life, the very life that we knew best, which at the time was undiluted and strong like concentrated wine, I denied that part of us, and he had never known that I'd done this. I never thought that he had embraced it. I thought it something shameful that we should put into our past and forget and never talk about. He thought it a natural part of us. Only after our souls came into more direct contact did this conflict turn into an open issue between us, but I didn't know that was what had happened. I thought it was frightening how he would push me to make me confess to things that were deeply painful to me, and sore, and frightful in themselves. It hurt me how he behaved to try and reach the part of me that I was rejecting, and it hurt him to have me reject these parts of us, and him.

I have trouble putting this into direct words. There are things you don't talk about to others. It's easier to speak through fiction but maybe what I really want is to be heard. Maybe dancing around it is not what I want to do. In some way it has been relieving to talk about it and let people get the impression that they do, but then it endlessly gnaws at me to not know what they landed at. People like the drama, the excitement of scandal. I know it would have been as the earth breaking in our time, our world. I know people spoke of it then, and spread rumours, and spoke ill of us.

I think I want to make it clear, first, that in our life before I kept to sensible boundaries. It wasn't hard and it wasn't a challenge and there was no desire to break them. What I always found odd is that my twin did not seem to perceive the boundaries: Calla has always initiated, suggested, offered more than I would have ever been comfortable having from him. It's not infatuation or attraction. It's his nature to not... understand why we kept to those lines. And I never thought more of it than that. It was as simple as rejection, of a particularly weary scoff and a roll of my eyes, to shed him from it and have him move onto whatever pleased him the next best; another glass of wine, another body to press against since mine was denied. I did not think of it as anything more than a result of his lack of concern for societal norms and taboos with his curiosity and our levels of comfort with each other. Maybe he wanted to get to me also; my irritation has always been to him its own reward, his ability to get under my skin as good an outcome as any other. Only after coming to here, in our shared state, did I realise it was much more than that. Not attraction, not infatuation, none of those things I had already known it wasn't, but also not nearly as shallow as simple curiosity or a way to get at me either. He really feels differently about it, and never really understood why I would rebuff him every time, when in the past such boundaries had not existed and there, to him, seemed to be no reason to keep them up. It feels, felt, feels like to him the taboo of it, that inner instinct of why you shouldn't and of course you shouldn't, didn't exist. It was enough that we were close and it would have felt good if we'd, what to him felt like, stopped pretending that it wouldn't.

That realisation and the proximity of it and the inescapable nature of our closeness made me so afraid in those first few months. And the more I was pulling back, the more he was pushing at it, the more he needed me to accept the parts that I'd rejected and to accept him and us as we are and have always been. At this point, I don't think I knew much about any other lives we'd lived. We were busy trying to sort out the one we knew we'd had and reconsile it with the one we have here. But I was afraid and I was putting down as many barriers as I could and wondering if - if really he was just insane in a way that I had never comprehended. He had a despair to him also that I could not understand and the depth of that need that he had was terrible to me. To me, what he was demanding of me was sex, and I did not want that of him or of us under any circumstances. It's... incredible how after spending almost 26 years of my life with him, I still did not even speak his language. I should have known to stop already then and question it, but instead I was putting all of my energy into keeping order, keeping the separation of the wrong and tainted with the correct and pure.

Because anything else would have required that I embrace something about myself that I didn't want to admit to. And again I don't mean desire, or attraction. I mean comfort. I mean - simply being able to accept that between us, I should stop looking out to ask what others need me to be, and focus on what we need me to be. What he does, first and foremost, but what that means, what that really means. Because, in those first months where we were trying to find a language that we shared, tried to learn to communicate, to understand each other again, there were times when I was breaking down and I would do things out of desperation that he was demanding of me and you can imagine that nothing was more confusing than to find out that he wanted none of those things and would end up injured and bleeding and bruised for the things I did to him that he had been begging me to do, incessantly nagging at me, all too close to forcing me to do to him.

I did not understand him. I didn't understand any of it. I was terrified and I was in pain and I felt sick and lost like something was permanently broken with us that I couldn't fix.

Around thirteen months ago, maybe thirteen and a half, he started pleading for me to wed him. It started from some story he'd read online, and the idea stuck. And again I resisted, because of course I did. I'm not going to marry my own brother. That's insane. That is not the way I feel about him. I don't want to - do that with my own brother. That is not the kind of a relationship we have. I am not a husband nor a wife to him and he is neither to me. Not how I perceived those things, anyway.

I think it was through this that I finally started understanding him, however. Because at least being wedded was somewhat detached from sex, and sex is one language we have never shared in common above others, I do not understand his appetites or his needs for it and he does not understand my lack of passion or the perceived lack of a need that I have in comparison, and I don't fundamentally crave for it, while he needs it above most other things just to express himself, and to communicate how he feels. His language is very physical because he struggles with verbalising himself: it's easier to be immediate, to express gentleness through touch, or anger through violence. Which might not be the kind you'd expect of him; he is not a very violent person, but his vocabulary holds such acts as biting, scratching, pushing, and gripping tight enough to bruise with his fingertips, tearing clothes, and spitting. Those are inherently violent acts, but he has no words to replace them. Even I don't know how between us he could express those feelings better. It is difficult to look inside his mind and truly understand how hard it has been for him this whole time: how many things that I always would tell him I wished he could just express normally are things that even I would never know in a thousand years how to put into words or conversation. How do you express the need to throw something at a window, when the language of your feeling is the precise reverberation of metal in the grid?

But wedding, a marriage, a union was a bridge that we could both use as a compromise. That, for him, represented symbolically the things that sex meant to him, while conveying to me what the feeling was that he needed to express with me.

Can you guess?

He was afraid to lose me. All that time, the clinginess, the holding onto me with tooth and nail, the pushing into physical connection that neither of us wanted, was about fearing that I was going to leave. That he had severed our bond and I would leave him. He wanted a union so that I would be bound to him with an oath that means the most to people: a promise to be with him forever, through anything, a commitment and a desire to stay.

He had to nag me about it for almost two months. Maybe two months. It might have started already in January: I think that it did. It took that long for me to start to understand what he meant. But the ceremony we had in itself was a peaceful one. I felt truly happy speaking those vows before the gods, choosing a patron for us whom we thought might understand and wish to guard over our bond. Even then in our physical journal, whose audience is none, I needed to write down for any future generations to come and unearth it that there was no consummation of this ceremony. It is not a carnal one in nature but one of the souls or the soul that we are. Like a seam made to connect something that was broken when we were born apart from each other.

It's been different in other lives. In some, we've been lovers. That is the red thread of lives to me: that parallel, foreign one that I do not come from, but which is to my soul like an echo. In our purple thread of lives, we are this.

But to him, this is a foreign concept. To him, there is no separation of purple and red thread, there is only one that is both, and neither, and our relationship is all of this at once, where our actions are chosen by the moment, to fit the circumstances. To him, it would make no difference to us should we make love here, right now, because in the next moment we would move on again, and be something else together again, and that is the truth of what we are then. This has been incomprehensible to me, because in my mind, should I ever sleep with him, that would leave a stain upon us that would mar the rest of that lifetime forever. I would need to do some kind of penance for it forever. But I am a hypocrite in this, because we've already touched each other in that life and this and in probably every life that we've ever lived because I cannot see one where we never did. We've simply been too close, always have been, in every time. The only difference is when we leave it behind, or don't. And to him, my insistence on shame and fear about the subject is a disease, not our inclination, this draw we have to each other. And in so many ways he is right: we can hurt each other, but it is not a necessary outcome of it. My shame is external to this, not internal. Indulging in intimacy is something that does not, in itself, feel bad to me. It's brought us closer before and it has now and we've always skirted about it even when it's been indirect, because in all things, we want to be close to one another first and foremost. Nothing feels like anything if it isn't shared. What is there to life if we cannot share it or taste it together? It is not coercive, it's natural. But.

I don't know if I should press post on this. I don't know if I'm ready or if I'll ever be. I don't want to talk about it but I desperately want to be heard. You cannot be heard if you don't try to talk about it.

A year in retrospect from that union, the vows we gave for one another, we're doing much better. We're calm and content with each other and I can't really remember the last time that Calla's actions would hurt me. I don't know when mine last hurt him. He's healing and he's more stable and balanced than he has ever been. He's happy, expanding his comfort zone to other people, to casual friendships, to close friendships, to activities and hobbies beyond the limited sphere of our claustrophobic duality. I still don't know how to do that and I think it's because I have so much shame and I cannot let go of that. I feel like no one would ever have me this way, aside from him. That I can never be honest with anyone because anyone else would condemn me for what and who I am. I always do the wrong thing, choose the wrong words. And at the end of the day I cannot even tell the truth to anyone. Somehow, my brother never suffered of any of this. He doesn't care if others will accept him. To him, their opinions are nothing. He discards people as easily as he picks them up if they displease him. To me, all I can feel is their judgement, present or impending. It is inevitable. I am dirty and disgusting and weak and wrong in so many ways. He's the only one who doesn't make me feel that way.