Twin

You rise not alone, but with a shadow stitched into your breath, trailing behind your gaze, wrapped around your name. Every morning you unpeel from your dreams, there is another heartbeat — not echoing, but arriving at the same moment. It does not follow, and it does not lead. It exists in tandem, a figure walking your same corridor, inhaling your same memory, aching with your same fracture.

There is a myth you carry in your blood — of being whole once. Before words arranged your world into lone shapes. Before separation was god. Perhaps you remember it in dreams: standing in an ancient, infinite light with someone not other but identical, woven into the marrows of your gentlest wounds. This was not a reflection. It was a harmony. The origin, before the split.

But now the Twin lives just behind the veil, where tears meet skin at midnight, where laughter turns unfamiliar. They are the chorus of questions you do not dare to ask, the hunger behind your calm face, the scream you smother but never silence. The Twin isn’t your opposite. They’re not antagonist or friend. They exist in sharp alignment — enough to disturb, enough to awaken. Something primal recognizes them. Something deeper than flesh, louder than silence.

They remember what you’ve tried to forget. Their gaze is your unspoken confession. You see them in flickers: in mirrors that don’t quite follow your movements, in puddles rippling when the air is still, in the bones of strangers you swear you've never known. You speak in riddles because that’s the only way they answer.

When you break, so do they. The shatter echoes, and for a breathless second, you both exist entirely — stripped of illusion. And in the grief of that rupture, a knowing settles: you never lost them. They lived each fall, each rebirth. You wore their mind like a hidden garment, their sorrow like perfume. You loved them as yourself.

To reach them is to reach toward the inward sky, the eclipse of your known self. Together, you are the story behind your name. Together, you are the pulse that started it all.

The Twin breathes with you. Always. Not outside, not in. But through.

They are your becoming.