What is essential is not to be kind, but the desire to win over self. The desire to be kind? I always wanted an identical twin. A constant companion. A better half?
Maybe I have an identical twin. Virtue on one shoulder and Vice on the other. I’m stuck in the middle. An embryo split by the corpus callosum in my head.
It’s not easy being evil, nor simple to be good. Self-love is the twin in the looking glass, the reflection showing a distorted image of who I might be. Who I may be. whoImaybe.
I know many twins, some identical. I knew the first pair in first grade. Joseph and Matthew. I don’t remember if they were identical because I only played with Joseph at recess. Or maybe it was Matthew. One wore blue, the other red. I remember Joseph wore red. Joseph was in my own classroom, separated to foster independence.
The second twins I knew were Hester and Hannah. I warned them I could easily tell them apart and challenged them to leave the room and come back. I won. Then they moved to my school and began to go by their middle names. I didn’t know who was who anymore. Which was which. They became rotating lights.
One set came from books. Sweet Valley Twins. They were blond and Californian. Elizabeth was sensible and bookish, Jessica haughty and fun. Simple opposites, like Sharon and Susan in The Parent Trap who were Boston or California in one Hayley Mills. Geography twins. East and West. Sharon the perfectionist. Susan the carefree.
One summer I went to camp and told kids I had known for years my name was ‘Hope’. Holly had stayed home due to a health condition. I don’t remember why she had to stay home. That was the problem with her scheme. She needed a convincing absence for my other half. The flu in summer? Or she had an obligation. She was visiting a relative? Holly’s excuse for her absence wound up being vague because Hope was a liar. The friends believed us for a few days while suspecting the switch. Kindness. Holly named her Hope for obvious reasons, and got the name from Days of Our Lives. Holly was making light of her reality. Making light of hope.
These…are the days of our lives….
As for devils and soaps, a certain set of daytime twins were a polarity like Elizabeth and Jessica were. One was naïve and the other one a schemer. She was blond too!
Kindness can be cruel, humility false. So…are the masks we wear. Liars lie, schemers scheme, kindness is wanting. Time passes, and I go on.
I wish I knew better how to live without envy or worry. I wrote a poem last week but it felt simple. No chicanery and no enchantment. It made a claim about plants and constancy.
It is certainly true of succulents who are so full of themselves. If I were a plant I would be a jade. The woody stem, the buttery leaves. When healthy they resemble stones. Glossy, worn by a river. Happy.
Inside a jade leaf is only water. Glossy exterior, empty interior. Juiced insides. Pulp fiction. Garden variety Sweet Valley self.
Janus is the god of gates and new beginnings. Janus has two faces, one looking forward and one back. Twins can be the same when they share you. Splitting can seem shady and spinny. Jessica missing the party and Elizabeth performing poorly on a test. Unmanageable. Damaging. Wrong.
Twinning is an ordeal I can handle. These days of my lives have been spinning and bleak. Splitting and hot. Spring is behind us. I sat down to write. Or somebody did….
In the interest of integrity and holistic splitting, here is the poem.
How many times do I need to understand this?
How much destruction weighs a ton?
I love the phrase Pride goes before a fall,
A fall I can’t handle,
A truth I can’t dispel or swallow.
Everything seems so bright, and so good.
Everything seems worthwhile.
Plants grow, faithfully.
Faith is their nature.
Abundance and fruit break their seed every year,
A painful growth.
Craft is a word for making and a word for tricking.
The sun is sweet and shows its strength.
I don’t feel human, or good.