Twins in Retrograde
We were the Great Miracle1 until we went insane: identical twins conceived to a praying mother after her unbelieving brute of a husband 2 forced her to get her tubes tied and close the gaping, ever-pleading, hungry mouths the couple had gone bankrupt twice to feed already. Getting a diagnosis broke our praying mother’s heart. It gave a clinical name to the Legion3 swimming around in our sticky brains like hornets in honey.4 We have matching carving scars that used to read Bitch but have now faded to look like vaguely scribbled constellations: same star signs, same green eyes.
Cancer Suns, Virgo Risings, and Pisces Moons.
(A scar is cheaper than a tattoo.)
Everyone has read about those studies done on twins separated at birth where the twins marry women with the same name, get the same kind of dog, go into the same kind of work, and name their children the same names. But living within proximity to each other, we were allowed to be different on purpose: you wear pink, I’ll wear blue; you cut your hair, I’ll grow mine long; you play sports, I’ll learn to dance; you like chocolate, I like strawberry. And yet… you go insane, I’ll go insane.
We must have made a suicide pact in the womb, wrapping our umbilical cords around each other’s throats to go out screaming and covered in our praying mother’s blood. But we have different methods of death5 that we favor, that we’ve tried:6 bleach vs. drowning; jumping into traffic vs. a car “accident”; whiskey vs. vodka.
But we both like knives. So much so that we’re not allowed to handle them.
(A scar is cheaper than a tattoo.)
We’re twenty-one, and one of us is in a Baker’s7 parking lot mixing bleach with lemonade. It’s almost the Fourth of July, the sky is gray, but there’s still heat hovering under the clouds. It might storm but probably won’t. Some Uncle Sam blow-up balloon is rave dancing on the other side of the parking lot, and patriots are buying cheap fireworks in the adjoining tent. Prometheus pieces together a Frankenstein with daddy/god issues. Sirens summon down, down. There’s a boyfriend on the scene, dragging her out of the chemical-drenched car as the front of her shirt is quickly discolored. Clorox bleach dribbles down her chin eerily like vomit. A steak knife she bought at the Dollar Tree was used to shred up her steering wheel because it was too dull to break skin. Her eyelids are flickering.
Did you drink it? He’s ready to dial 9-1-1, trying to shake her awake first.
No.
Sick for three days.
(A scar is cheaper than a tattoo.)
We’re twenty-five and at a bar, laughing and joking with our husbands who both happen to be over six feet tall, autistic, and blond. We want them to be friends. We’re drinking but not yet drunk, but suddenly one of us is on her feet and out the door. She’s going to run into the traffic. There’s a storm in the neighboring city, and lightning illuminates the skyline like glowing Harry Potter scars. Her other halves8 follow, with the womb-mate tackling her first before the headlights do. Barely missed being tired. Remus and Romulus, Jacob and Esau, wrestling, rolling, tumbling on the ground. Fighting death.9 Are there punches? Bites? It’s a blur to know even who is who, jumbled closer than we were at birth, screaming and covered in our praying mother’s love. Pairs of headlights pass by like lightning in the sky of a storm, like Juliet passing through the life of Romeo, like Phaeton crashing the chariot of Helios. We are Kamikaze deer in the night, so determined to hold the other back we’ve forgotten which one wants to lunge forward.
Let me go!
You need help.
I’m fine.
A husband hoists up the mania-inflamed twin like seizing a piece of steak off the grill: sizzling, rare. A liver getting pecked out by an eagle daily, hourly. She’s thrust into a car with child locks like a cat into a carrier bound for the vet. Hissing.
(A scar is cheaper than a tattoo.)
What are we doing? There’s nothing wrong with us. When it storms, it storms. We’re just different. We feel things in an intense way. Some therapist uses words like manic and borderline personality disorder and synesthesia and seasonal affective disorder. Some husband uses words like drunk bitch and psycho. Some praying mother uses words like spiritually disconnected from God and demon harassed. Some dad uses words like relationship troubles and bad days. Some employer uses words like hard-working and reliable while another employer uses unpredictable and slow-moving.
There’s nothing wrong with us. Unless you look closely and see our thighs or our arms. Stretch marks? Tiger stripes. Faded, pale lines. We’ve weathered worse. Can’t even see them, most days.
But sometimes, they burn, like shoving your thumb into a car’s cigarette lighter.
(A scar is cheaper than a tattoo).
An evil twin motif; a crazy twin motif; we politely take turns. Except when Pluto enters retrograde, then it’s a mixed-mania, free-for-all, Dionysus-inspired madness, running into the woods and joining the wild animals.10 Did you know that you can experience mania and depression at the same time? It’s called a mixed episode. That’s when the Bad Things happen, when the fingerprints of the stars press down around our throats and throttle us into psych wards and closed garages with the car running.
Mixed episodes are the ones where it’s hard to tell exactly what about this disorder is Bipolar. Bi. Two. There’s supposed to be two poles: mania11 and depression.12 When the poles cross, the world implodes, much like we imagine the planet would crumble if the North and South Pole suddenly mingled. It’s when children mix all of the play-doh or the paint colors because if you take all the subtleties and beauties and wonders of the world and mash them together with your fingers you would get something extraordinary… or an ugly, shit-colored gray. Imagine an espresso martini, or the Four Loko alcoholic energy drink, on steroids. Uppers and downers all jumbled up together, when your inner voice is actually an Intrusive Thought or Auditory Hallucinations, and your impulse control is set to zero, and your innate sense of self-preservation and inhibitions are completely erased. You’re an omniscient god who wants to save the world but also commit suicide in the process, like The Holy Father scheming together with His Son to get Jesus13 killed as brutally and temporarily as possible. But make it look like an accident: a martyrdom, a sacrifice.
(A scar is cheaper than a tattoo.)
One of us has good health insurance, takes her meds, sees a psychiatrist regularly, and we cross our fingers it helps us both. One tongue, two stomachs, a reverse-Hydra fighting a Herculean mental disorder. Cut off one head, what grows back? Paper clothes, grippy socks.
Things are not always doom, gloom, and scissors under the pillow. One of us accidentally became a mom, one of us went back to school. One of us is a good mom who doesn’t pray, one of us is a good student who prays she doesn’t become a mom. Fuck Gabriel. Fuck Zeus. Abort the Messiah, if necessary. There is nuance, stability. More good days than bad. Storm clouds dissipate in the early morning. We go hiking, bowling, out for dessert and to Drag Bars. We make TikToks and one of us is microfamous14 and the other one is camera shy.15 On the same day, one of us got a silver play button on Youtube and one of us won an editor’s choice award at the university literary magazine. It’s been months since a severe episode on either channel, but there have been storm clouds lately. We’ve had an unusually windy spring.
(A scar is cheaper than a tattoo.)
Our first matching scars happened within weeks of each other at two years old. Neither of us possesses anything more specific than images conjured up by the stories repeated by a praying mother and laughing siblings, and the jagged souvenirs on our foreheads.
Two years old, a metal bunk bed, and one of us tumbles off the side, hitting her head on the way down. Wrapped up in swaddling clothes16 and stitched up, screaming and wiggling. Picking the bird stuffed animal that folds into an egg when the nurses offer a sedative gift. Phoenix. Resurrection.
Two weeks later, two years old, a miscalculated corner at the children’s museum while playing tag. Injected with something before getting stitches, sleeping and chill, not making a sound. Picking the bird stuffed animal that folds into an egg when the nurses offer a reward gift, the exact same stuffed animal that her sister picked just two weeks earlier. Another Phoenix. Another Resurrection. The cycle continues, storms come and go.
No one can explain why we picked the same stuffed animal. We don’t even remember what we named them, just that there were two stuffed birds in our room that could reverse into an egg. We got our souvenirs, and the same tiny dash on our foreheads. They sit in almost the exact same spot, the upper right-hand corner that a haircut with bangs would hide forever.
The diagnoses happened farther apart than the first matching scars. Distance. Time. Crawling from the stomach of Kronos. A few years gapped the medical records that labeled us each Bipolar. There was no thunk! or puddles of blood dribbling down our faces, no caregiver to stumble upon a crying scene to haul us immediately to the children’s hospital. There were only symptoms—first, laundry lists of why no one could ever love us—that dragged us down into clinical white spaces with paper clothes and psychiatrists, self-inflicted lacerations and megadosing antidepressants. Episodes, seasons, phases: storm clouds gathering over the ever-changing moon. We’re not so different, but never the same. Twin planets flirting with retrograde.
The diagnoses happened farther apart than the first matching scars. Distance. Time. Crawling from the stomach of Kronos. A few years gapped the medical records that labeled us each Bipolar. There was no thunk! or puddles of blood dribbling down our faces, no caregiver to stumble upon a crying scene to haul us immediately to the children’s hospital. There were only symptoms—first, laundry lists of why no one could ever love us—that dragged us down into clinical white spaces with paper clothes and psychiatrists, self-inflicted lacerations and megadosing17 antidepressants. Episodes, seasons, phases: storm clouds gathering over the ever-changing moon. We’re not so different, but never the same. Twin planets flirting with retrograde.
Endnotes
- Medical error ↩︎
- Normal guy who literally couldn’t afford more children ↩︎
- Demons, presumably ↩︎
- After the exorcisms didn’t work ↩︎
- Attempted death ↩︎
- And failed ↩︎
- Local grocery store that’s since closed down ↩︎
- Who takes priority: a twin or a husband? ↩︎
- Against or to? ↩︎
- Sometimes there’s wine involved but not always ↩︎
- Too happy ↩︎
- Too sad ↩︎
- There’s no Holy Spirit yet in this Trinity, just the duality of father and son and happy and sad ↩︎
- 120k followers on Youtube ↩︎
- Deleting followers everyday ↩︎
- No mangers, though ↩︎
- Apparently it takes more than eight pills to kill you, despite the warning label on the bottle ↩︎
Nicole Stander is a senior at University of Nebraska-Omaha pursuing a double major in both English and Creative Writing with a minor in Gender Studies. Her work has appeared in Ellipsis Literature and Art, Thirteenth Floor Magazine, Oakland Arts Review, and Glass Mountain. She lives in Omaha with her partner, three cats, and five rabbits.
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