We were born two, but we only ever lived one life.
We learned young how to pass the body back and forth — like trading a coat in a doorway. One of us wears it for the day, the other watches from behind the glass, a warm dark pane where breath fogs but never marks. Sometimes we watch, sometimes we don't — the silence can be easier than seeing. At night, we hand over: memories, notes, the ache in the left ankle, the fact that the door sticks if you don't lift and pull. She can see what I see, but not what it feels like from the inside — not the pulse behind the ribs or the thought that dies in the throat. Those go in the ledger.
During the day, the one in the body writes. The one behind the glass can only speak like a voice in the head, but the living twin cannot answer except through ink. The ledger is how we talk when the world is watching.
The body sleeps every night, as any body must. Dreams are the only place we are both absent, both gone. In sleep, we meet in the mind-space. Usually the glass is opened, the body is passed between us, and we go over the ledger face-to-face. In those hours, we can finally speak aloud. In the morning, one of us wakes in the body and the other becomes weather in the mind — present, invisible.
To everyone else, there has only ever been one of us.
College made the system elegant.In class, what one of us studies, the other receives like a secondhand book — notes scrawled in the margins but never the full lecture. That's why we write: not just the facts, but the meanings we carried, the half-formed thoughts that can't be seen through the glass. Knowledge passed between us feels like a photograph touched by too many hands — blurred at the edges, but still ours.
We live off campus in a basement apartment with two narrow windows that only show hedges. We take turns: Monday/Wednesday/ alternating Fridays for me, Tuesday/Thursday/ alternating Fridays for my sister. We split the work of two jobs — café and campus library — so the rent is easy, and everyone just thinks I have tireless energy. Sometimes a café regular spots me shelving books, surprised to see me again. They laugh and say I must live here. I smile and let them believe it. Professors think I'm consistent. Our landlord thinks I'm punctual. No one wonders how "I" am always available.
We share a bank account, a phone, a closet, a face.
We are efficient. We are careful.
It was careful, at least, until Elias showed up.
He took the open seat beside me in Philosophy of Mind — an irony so sharp I nearly laughed. He had a smile that seemed reluctant, like it had to be coaxed out of him, and a habit of underlining the second half of his sentences in his notes. He wore headphones around his neck like a talisman.
When he asked if I had the syllabus, the way he listened to my answer made me feel like I was saying something important even when I wasn't. By the end of class, we were laughing for real about nothing at all.
It was quick, yes, but gravity doesn't measure itself in minutes. I fell.
We left together. At the steps outside the lecture hall, he asked if I wanted coffee. I said I was working next afternoon. He grinned.
"Then I'll come to you."
That's all it took. I wrote it down in the ledger:
Elias = coffee tomorrow @ 2. He's kind. He listens. Please —
I didn't finish the sentence. I didn't need to. She would understand.
I felt her flinch.
The next day was hers. At 1:55 pm, he arrived at the café, hair damp from drizzle, smile shy, shoulder hunched like he wasn't sure he was allowed to hope. I watched through the glass as she set the coffee down between them, her silence cutting sharper than words.
"I can't today," she said, voice flat. "Another time."
His face shuttered. "Sure of course."
I pressed my palms against the glass until my fingers felt like they'd bleed. Please, I whispered. Just an hour.
She didn't answer.
That night, in the ledger, she wrote it plain:
He came. I sent him away. You are reckless. You aren't thinking beyond your want. I won't let you pull us apart.
I read it like a ghost rereading its own obituary. Her words had no heat, no doubt, only finality. That left me colder than the glass ever had.
The next day, his warmth had a bruise on it. He still sat beside me but left a cautious space between us. I stitched it closed with jokes and long looks. He softened. By the end of class, he asked if I ever went to the Friday film series.
"Every other Friday," I said, carefully.
"I'll be there this week," he said.
In the ledger I wrote:
Film this Friday. I want to go. We bet 10 on it being a black and white we pretend is good. Please.
Her reply was neat,decisive:
"No. You are not thinking."
That night, when the body slept, I waited in the mind-space for the glass to open. Normally, she would step through and we would trade places, ledger in hand, our voices free at last. But this time she kept it shut. We floated on opposite sides of the dark pane, both speaking, both heard — but the glass warped every word, turning them thin and distorted. It was like trying to argue through water, close enough to see her lips move, too far to reach.
"Just give me a chance," I begged.
"You're not thinking past your want," she said, her voice rippling strangely through the barrier.
"What is there to think about? He makes me feel... present. Like I'm not a shadow waiting for my turn."
Her voice came steady, quiet, almost kind. "Present for you is abandonment for me."
"You know that's not true."
"Do I?" She leaned against the pane, her outline wavering in the dark. "If you fall in love, where do I live? Do you think I'll just fade while you build a life in our name? Do you think I'll watch you touch someone, kiss someone, while I rot in the dark?"
The words cut because I hadn't thought that far. I only knew I was drowning.
"Please," I whispered. "Don't take this from me."
She said nothing. And in the morning, she didn't open the door. The link went dark.
For the first time, I half-existed.
I drifted in silence, watching her live our life without me. Elias passed her in the hall, his smile faltered when she gave him nothing. He stopped trying.
At first, I whispered through the glass:
"Please. Just let me borrow an hour. Just let me see him."
Then I bargained:
"I'll give up weekends. I'll take the morning shifts forever. I'll stop asking for anything else."
Silence.
When she didn't answer, I prayed. Not to God, but to him. He would understand, I told myself. If he knew, he would stay. He would call me real, not broken. He would save me.
The prayers turned into chants.
He will understand. He will love me. He will never leave.
Over and over until the words stopped sounding like words and became the only air I knew how to breathe.
Belief was no longer thought. Belief was survival. Belief was my religion.
And religion demands sacrifice.
So I stopped knocking on the glass and started clawing at it. Not a coat to be passed, not a window to be opened, but a mirror to be broken. My nails scraped until I felt myself splintering with it. Each crack hurt, but hurt meant I was closer. Hurt meant the world could bleed for me as I had for it.
One day, the mirror shattered. It was early afternoon. A hoisted sky. The courtyard busy with backpacks and midterms. Elias was there at the far end, adjusting his backpack strap. My sister froze as I stepped through the broken glass and seized her hands, her voice, her breath.
"It's me," I gasped. "It's always been me. The days you liked me — that was me. I need you to listen. I'm not who you think I am. I'm only half."
He blinked. "Half of what?"
"Half of us. My sister and me. We share this body. We switch. Every other day. The cold days were hers, the warm were me. I swear to you, I swear on everything — I'm real."
For one beat, the world made a place for a miracle. His eyes lingered on me, not with disbelief but with a searching I wanted to call recognition. I thought — if I held my breath, if I kept still, the truth might root itself in him and grow. I thought he might smile, might say my name like it belonged to me alone. For one beat, I believed the story I'd told him could be enough.
Then his face changed.
Confusion hardened into something worse. "You've got to be kidding me," he said, but his voice cracked at the edges, sharp and trembling. "All this time — what the hell was I to you? Some sort of science experiment? A joke?"
"No — no, never. I meant every— "
"Don't." He snapped the word, too loud, brittle as glass. A couple of students turned their heads. He laughed once, short and shaky, like it hurt coming out. "Do you hear yourself? Do you have any idea how messed up this sounds? One day you act like you want me, the next you treat me like a stranger, and now you're telling me there's two of you?"
He laughed again, brittle and angry. "You're insane. You've been leading me on this whole time."
"I wasn't leading you on," I begged. "It was me. All the good parts — it was me. Please Elias, you have to believe me—"
He stepped back, shaking his head like he was trying to fling something off. "You're sick. I don't know if you need a doctor or a padded room, but I want nothing to do with it. With you."
"No — don't say that, dont—"
"Stay. Away. From me." The words wavered but landed hard, like a door slammed shut. He looked at me — not like someone he'd almost cared for, but like something dangerous he had just barely escaped.
Then he turned and he left.
The world didn't stop to notice that I had shattered with the mirror. My sister slammed the door so hard it felt like it killed me.
Now I float in darkness. Elias is gone. My sister will not speak. The body goes on without me: studying, working, sleeping. Efficient, careful. And I can see it all through the glass — every borrowed breath, every step that should have been mine — but I cannot touch a single moment.
Sometimes I think the tragedy isn't that he didn't believe me. It's that I believed so hard I mistook hunger for proof.
And maybe the tragedy is older. We taught ourselves to be singular so no one would see the cracks. But I was never whole. I was always two mouths gnawing at one body — one for safety, one for love. Both starving. Both true. Both impossible together.
And sometimes—
I replay his face. The way his gaze lingered before it curdled. The way his voice trembled when he called me insane. The way his eyes slid away from me, as though I had already become a stranger.
I tell myself it was disgust. Hatred. Rejection.
But disgust does not shake the hands. Hatred does not make the voice break. Rejection does not look away like that.
Fear does.
And fear is not born from nothing. Fear means danger. Fear means recognition. Some part of him saw me. Some part of him believed.
That thought gnawed at me until hunger became vow.
If he saw me once, he can see me again. If he believed for a breath, he can believe forever.
The words circle, they beat inside me, a rhythm, a second pulse that belongs only to me:
If once, then again. If again, then always.
And if I clawed through the mirror once, I can do it again. Next time I won't stop. Next time I'll hold the body long enough to make him see — to make him understand, to make him stay.
Belief is still my religion. Only now the prayer has sharpened into something hungrier, a vow tangled deep into marrow:
He will love me. He will.
And when the chanting fades, silence swells. It coils through the dark, whispering what I do not want to hear: there is no room for two hungers in one body. That to be whole, something must give.
I do not answer it. I only listen.
And the longer I listen, the more it sounds like truth—
until the whisper curls into the old question, the one that gnaws and never loosens:
How does one live when they only half exist?