Sitting opposite you in the dimly lit coffee shop I listen to the life you narrate. You tell me your story with so much enthusiasm and I wonder what it is like to be my twin.
Your childhood full of rose petals and lavender. Of warm hands that caress the talc into your body until you shimmer like a star. You describe the fluffy, pink princess dresses and the ballerina shoes and the eyes that watch your every pirouette, brimming with love and pride.
Your life, a tutty fruity ice cream, full of flavour and speckled with a rainbow of colour. The laughter, the sharing of jokes, the sharing of each blissfull summer day. Picnics in meadows, that are spattered with the crimson of poppies and the Naples yellow of the cow slips. The birds that sing their melodies just for you. As you lie with your blonde ringlets caressing your face, as you stare up at the cloud flecked sky, the bees congregate to form a perfect heart around your body.
I’m almost gagging on the happiness of it all. Choking on your accomplishments and sick to the stomach with your sweet smelling life. My envy is bottle green, the ugliest kind. The resentment like a poisonous vapour that emanates from my mouth as I breath and I wonder that you cannot smell it, or that it doesn’t steal your syrupy breath and swallow you whole.
Your my flip side. The other side of the coin. You have been dipped in coke so that you are resurrected from the fizzy black pop to be golden and perfect. My side has been dipped in the blackest tar so that I am almost invisible and have no value at all.
As you stir your coffee and pause for breath I think we are like an LP. You’re the A side. It crones of love and paper roses. The melody and harmony in tune and pure. Yet I am the B side. Tragic and lost. Lonesome and angry.
And why shouldn’t I be. Separated at birth - was it at the flip of a coin? My novel reads nothing like yours. My life story is full of anguish and despair. There were no loving arms to caress me. No fairy cakes and no maple pancakes. It was hard, abusive and sordid and I have been left broken, like a china doll that has been dropped on the tiles. With heavy boots to crunch the shattered pieces into the floor so that they crumble into dust. Into nothingness.
As you continue with your tales of flying kites on and autumn breeze, of cats that purred affectionately on your knees, of kisses good night in the dark – I wonder if it crosses your mind what it would be like to be me.
Copyright © 2008 Rob Richardson. All Rights Reserved.