Twin Souls

It was on my second birthday that the odd mental pressure returned. Panic smothered my thoughts, and my vision narrowed as darkness crept in at the periphery. Heart pounding in my ears, my consciousness slipped and I stumbled, dropping to my knees. I clutched my chest, breath ragged and shallow, and collapsed face first.

Resé scrambled from her rocking chair, shouting something I could not understand. She rolled me over, and I caught a glimpse of her tear stained face before I slipped into the void.

The world was a black, formless space. Incorporeal, my spirit drifted along unseen currents as the suffocating weight of something unknown pressed in on me from all sides. I tried to reach out, to cry for help, but I did not have a body nor a voice.

“Hello?” A voice echoed in my mind. “Hello?! Please, please let the work. Please.”

Dizziness hit me like a tidal wave, as if my head had been struck by a bludgeon. What is happening? Am I under attack? Where am I? Thoughts zipped through my mind like arrows.

“I am not trying to harm you,” the same voice said. It sounded closer than before, anxious and scared.

Who is that? I wondered, still trying to orient myself. The oppressive weight lifted from my chest and I felt the breath of life once more.

“You can hear me? You can hear me! Oh thank god, you can hear me,” the voice said, growing more distinct with each passing word. “You don’t know how long I have been trapped in here, trying to make contact.” I could hear the unfamiliar entity crying softly, and a powerful protective instinct welled up inside me. The same sudden and overwhelming familial emotions I felt the day I was born suffused my soul, a gentle heat that promised tender care and unerring love. I last felt them the moment Resé had embraced me as a newborn, her face pallid and tear-stained from the exertions of labor, the despair of loss, and hope for the future.

Who are you? I asked, struggling against the intense onrush of emotion.

“My name is—or was—Melana,” she responded. Her voice was clear and melodious now, unmistakably feminine. “I was reincarnated, I think. I have been trapped in this body with you for two years, trying to make contact with you.”

That was too much information for me to process at once, and my mind started to go numb. This person is in my head?

“Yes,” Melana answered my unvoiced question. “And I can hear all your thoughts, as well.”

I spun in the void, trying to find her. The space around me was still empty, a vast ocean of black, like a starless night sky. Where are you?

“I am here. I am you.” I felt her give the mental equivalent of a shrug. “I have been here since the day you were born, but I am not sure why. My memory of that time is fuzzy at best. I died, then like waking from a dreamless sleep I found myself in this place. I could hear everything you did, see and feel and taste it all, but I could neither speak nor move.”

Melana’s sudden appearance did more to shake my world view more than anything had since I was first reincarnated. Over the previous years, I slowly came to an uneasy equilibrium—this world was clearly Earth far in the future, or far in the past. Besides the reincarnation itself, there had been no indication that this world was different from the one I had left behind. There was no magic, no monsters, no labyrinths or dungeons to explore. Now, I was reconsidering everything. What if I am wrong?

I cast my thoughts back to the day I was born for the second time, struggling to remember every detail I could. It was an arduous task, like there was a demarcation somewhere in my memories, separating my earliest experiences from my current self, a barrier meant to keep me from reliving the trauma of birth itself. With agonizing slowness, I dredged up the past. I recalled being born, my mother caressing me in her warm arms, and I remembered…

“That’s it,” I said aloud, then realized that I could speak again. “I had a twin sister. She was stillborn, but I can still remember my grandmother holding her tiny hand.” For some reason, tears welled up in my eyes and my chest grew tight.

“I did not realize,” Melana said. Her voice betrayed a touch of confusion, but she did not press for more details. We sat in silence for a minute, until I felt Melana’s soul start to separate from mine.

“Where are you going?” I asked. There was panic around the edges of my tone, a wild and new fear I had never experienced before. Melana paused, and then settled once more close to me.

The feeling of souls touching is indescribable. It is almost sensual, though there is nothing sexual about it. Intimacy is too shallow a word for experiencing someone else’s every thought, every emotion, every surface level memory—it is a roaring tsunami crashing against the shore, but it is also a gentle zephyr blowing through your hair.

“I—” Melana cut off whatever she was about to say, and then pressed close to me. On instinct, I pushed back, and our two souls mingled and merged together for the briefest of moments, before whatever natural laws govern the soul repelled us apart again.

“Don’t leave me,” I whispered. I could feel the fear and angst echoed from Melana. We sat together for a long moment before I spoke again. “I never knew her, my twin sister. She was gone before I was even born, and yet with you here, I feel like I have met her, in a way.”

“It makes sense,” Melana said, picking up the trailing thread of a thought I had left off. “I was to be your sister, that is what you think? But somehow her body perished, and I was tethered here to you instead.”

“Yes,” I said. A sob escaped and I took a moment to compose myself. Why am I feeling this way?

“Because there is a natural and inescapable bond between family,” Melana said. I had meant for the thought to be private, but there, in that moment, there was no privacy between us. “I am not your sister—I never inhabited that body, I never shared blood with you. But…”

I knew Melana could not adequately express the difficult emotions roiling inside herself. I could not either, but I understood them on a primal level. We were family, but we were not family. We were one person, but two at once, together in action but separate in thought.

“So, you can sense everything that I can?” I asked after a moment, more to break the silence and move the conversation forward than out of real curiosity.

“I can,” she said. “In fact, I suspect I can sense more than you can—or rather, more than you do. I never had this level of awareness in my previous life, it is almost as if every part of my mind that should be working to keep my body functioning, is instead invested in processing the information I receive.”

“That’s incredible.”

“It is, but it has also been something of a curse these last two years. I cannot begin to describe how frustrating it is to be aware, but not be able to do anything with that awareness.”

I was quiet for a moment, then spoke. “Want to try taking over for a while?”

“I would love to,” she said. “But I do not think I can. There is no reason you would know this, being a soul tethered to mortal flesh, but I can see things for how they are. We cannot separate you from your body. In this space, this spiritual world or whatever you want to call it, you are a physical object with form and definition, while I am simply an ethereal concept.”

“How do you know though?”

“I have tried,” Melana said. “I hesitate to tell you this because I don’t want to anger you, but I have tried to take over while you slept. Our souls can get infinitely close to one another, but they repel one another somewhere in that infinite closeness. There is no way for me to actually pull you away from your body.”

I thought about that for a second, then decided it did not upset me. “I would have tried the same thing,” I said. “No one wants to be white-room tortured for two years. I am sorry.”

“Hardly your fault,” she said. “Anyway, I am going to retreat for now. Keeping this line of communication open is exhausting.”

Now that she mentioned it, I realized I was also growing weary. “Do not be a stranger. I am here if you want to talk, anytime.” I was not sure why I was being so forward, possibly because we were trapped together either way, but I felt like there was something deeper to it.

As she retreated, my mind slipped out of the void and back into my physical body. My mother was rocking me in her arms, wailing. “No no no, I won’t lose you too, please Genai don’t take him from me.”

I reached one tiny hand up and tugged on her braid, the way I had a thousand times before. “I am okay, mama.”

She froze, and stared into my eyes. Her face was puffy and red, twisted into a mask of agony. “What happened, where did you go?” Her voice trembled with fear.

Should I tell her the truth? Would that hurt her more, or would she think I had gone mad? I wondered.

“Don’t be sad mama, I am okay,” I said, and hugged her around the waist. “I tripped and hit my head but I am better now.”

Resé gripped me tight in a hug, then lifted me off the floor and carried me to my bed. She was silent the entire time, but the tension in her bearing sloughed away with each passing moment. Half an hour later, she was asleep, her head resting on the bed beside me.

Two souls in one body. So what now? I wondered as I too slipped into dreamland.