On Being Someone's Twin

People expect twins to be a matched set. They ask if we finish each other's sentences, if we felt it when the other got hurt, if there's some wordless current running between us that outsiders can't access. The truth is less mystical and, I think, more interesting: my twin brother and I are probably the two most different people in whatever room we're standing in, and it doesn't matter at all.

Jaren wrestles. He plays football. He runs cross country, same as me, and he plays golf, also same as me - those two are where the overlap ends and mostly, I think, by coincidence rather than closeness. He has no interest in politics. He doesn't read the way I read, doesn't write, would not choose to spend an evening the way I choose to spend most of mine, hunched over a draft or a bylaw or a column that's due somewhere. If you sat the two of us down and asked us to describe what we care about, you'd get two lists with almost nothing in common. And still, of everyone I know, he is the person I'd call first.

I think the version of twinhood people imagine is built on sameness, and what nobody tells you is that sameness isn't actually the thing that makes it what it is. What makes it what it is is something closer to certainty. Not the certainty that he understands what I'm working on, he mostly doesn't, and doesn't pretend to, but the certainty that if I fell, he'd be there to catch me, and that this isn't a hope or a hypothesis, it's just a fact about the world I've had access to since before I have memories at all.

I don't know how to explain how rare that is without sounding like I'm exaggerating it. Most people spend a long time looking for one person they trust that completely, and a lot of people never quite find it. I didn't have to look. It was just there, already, before I was old enough to know to be grateful for it, which might be its own kind of luck: not just having it, but having it long enough before you understood its value that you never had the chance to take it for granted in the first place.

What he actually gives me isn't companionship in the interests-shared sense. It's closer to a kind of ballast. He doesn't care about politics, but that's never stopped him from showing up. He checks in about how the book's going, asks about the column, even though none of it is his world. It means something specific because of that, it's not performance, it's not because he's supposed to. He's just there. He keeps me in line in the most literal sense: he's not in my world, so he has no reason to flatter it. And I'd like to think I do the same for him, that whatever wrestling season or football game he's in the middle of, I'm a person who cares about it without needing to understand the sport to do it.

I used to think the differences between us were something to explain, that "we're actually really different" was a disclaimer people expected before the real story, the twin story, the sameness story. I don't think that anymore. I think the differences are the actual story. Two people who share a birthday, a house, and almost nothing else about how they choose to spend their time, and who are each other's best friend anyway, not despite that, but maybe partly because of it. There's no competition in it. You can't measure yourself against someone who wants none of what you want. What you can do instead is just trust them, completely, for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they understand you.

I don't know what to call that, exactly. It isn't friendship in the way I'd describe any other friendship, it started too early for that, before either of us chose it. It isn't rivalry, because there's nothing to compete over. Maybe the honest word is just luck. I was born with someone who will catch me. I didn't do anything to deserve that, and neither did he. We just happened to arrive at the same time, into the same certainty, and neither of us has let go of it since.