What We Know Now

When I tell people I'm a twin, they often ask if my sister is gay. She's not, which I, at least, think is obvious from appearance alone. My sister has more then ten pair of shoes and none of them are Chuck Taylors. In college she thought she might have a crush on a girl but she really just liked her earrings. She once hosted a Mary Kay party. I, however, the gay twin, haven't had hair past my chin since my dreadlock phase of 1997 and on the few occasions that I've worn a dress, I look like I'm in drag. As a child I was mistaken for a boy so often that I started telling people my name was Kyle to avoid their embarrassed apologies.

In a wobbling 20-year-old video that my father made, my sister and I are standing in front of our childhood home in matching Easter dresses. She's beaming at the camera with missing front teeth and a basket full of pastel eggs. I'm scowling and kicking a rotting stump, pissed off about the pink lace and the puffy sleeves. My sister wears white socks and patent leather shoes. I'm in snow boots and a baseball cap.

There's still a lot different about the two of us—she's 5'5”, I'm 5'6”. She has straight hair, I have curly hair. She's funny and smart and ambitious. I would rather sit on a barstool telling lies than earn a paycheck. But the biggest difference between us is our sexuality, and consequently, our lifestyles. I know that not all queer people live in an endless tide of drama and gossip and heartache, but I, at least, seem to have gotten the high drama gene along with the gay gene. My sister's life, however, is calm, drama-free, normal. And I know this is a vast generalization, but “calm, drama-free, and normal” aren't really words used to describe the queer women I know, or, at least, the ones I've loved.

A few years ago, for instance, my girlfriend and I moved from Asheville to Portland, Oregon—both cities, by the way, where one can safely to assume that any two girls walking down the street together are more than just friends. My girlfriend, Alice, was starting law school. Being in a Big Gay City was fun and exciting but I had a hard time finding work and when I did find it, I had a hard time keeping it, so I spent a lot of time pretending to be a 1950s housewife while Alice was busy learning. She'd come home from school to a warm dinner, fresh laundry, and a girlfriend completely fucked up on pills. Alice was too distracted by the Constitution to notice my new inability to open my eyes more than half-way, so this worked out until I lost most of my savings in a failed investment in Humboldt County botany. Meaning, I spent a lot of time smoking weed and buying shit off the internet. After that, it was time to get a job. Any job. I ended up scooping gelato in faux-Italian patisserie managed by a high school senior. And this too worked out for a little while. I spent the majority of my waking hours covered in melted sugar amid the screams of upper middle class children who wanted the medium, not the small, but at least I learned the Italian words for various flavors of gelato: Fragola. Gianduja. Fior di latte.

But then they hired Sasha, a girl who, strangely, looked like an Asian American version of Alice. They had the same aural greens eyes and soft dusting of freckles. They were both silly in a way that adults mostly lose. And it was great---I spent nights with the woman I loved and afternoons with her gelato-scooping equivalent. We were still happy then, Alice and I. On her 26th birthday, I rose in the cold, biked around our neighborhood in search of doughnuts and champagne and candles. I rode home balancing a box of Krispy Kreme on my handlebars, hoping she would at least feign sleep and surprise when I walked into our bedroom with bubbling flutes and flaming doughnuts and a sleepy rendition of Happy Birthday. She did, of course. But the combination of absent girlfriend and pretty co-worker led to the inevitable, and soon Sasha and I were closing the shop early to make out in the manager's office beneath the Federal Minimum Wage notice.

At first, I managed to get dinner on the table every night before Alice got home, ask her the right questions, and look attentive while she talked about precedence in tort law. But maintaining a double life is no easy task and soon I was thinking about Sasha when I should have been faking interest in my girlfriend's studies. We were breaking-up and she was too distracted by the Supreme Court and I was too distracted by Sasha to even notice. It started slowly, the dismemberment of our four year long relationship, but eventually we stopped pretending to be interested in each other. We fought over small things, petty things, instead of fighting over the things that mattered---namely that I was losing her to academia and she was losing me to Sasha. It was a long, protracted breakup with lots of tears and yelling and makeup sex and the eventual, sad acknowledgment that shit would not work out in the end. Alice still didn't know about Sasha, but she did know that things weren't right. She started sleeping in her office. I got the bedroom, but she took all the blankets.

After a unpleasant fight ended when Alice punched a wall and sprained her elbow, I took a Xanax and went to a bar up the street. The bartender happened to be going through his own breakup at time and poured Maker's Mark in solidarity. A few hours of drinking and commiserating later, I sort of passed out on the bathroom floor. It wasn’t a full-fledged pass out, but more of an underfed, over-drunk catnap. After a little while, Alice found me and hauled me outside into the rain, where I decided that the sidewalk was a fine place for a nap. After she kicked me in the kidneys and yelled that I was a whore and a drunk, Alice hailed a cab, got me in the house, and left me to sleep it off on the bathroom floor.

The next day I received a panicked call from my sister back in North Carolina. I hadn’t told her Alice and I were having problems, in part because telling her would make it real, but she found out when she checked her voice mail that morning and heard a long and muffled fight as Alice tried to get me out of the sidewalk and into the cab. There are things, she said, one should never hear.

But because Alice and I loved each other as much as we hated each other, she forgave me for passing out at the bar, I forgave her for stealing the blankets, we laughed about pocket-dialing my sister in the middle of a drunken brawl, and our household resumed a semi-placid state, at least for the moment.

Two days later, Alice broke into my email, walked into the gelateria and screamed I can't believe you're fucking her over a five-year-old's head. Before I could turn away she decked me in the face—one right hook to the jaw and the collective gasp of a dozen customers. By the end of the day, I had lost my house, my job, and both of my girlfriends. A week later, I showed up at my sister's door across the country, pillow in hand.

Soon after I retreated back east, my sister's boyfriend left her for another woman. As the dutiful twin, I bought break-ups supplies: bottles of wine and a stack of People magazines. We got drunk off the wine and declared our solidarity with Jennifer Anniston. Men, we spat. Fucking men. My sister cried while I assured everything would be fine. The next day, she got up, wiped her eyes, took a couple aspirin, and her life resumed it's normal course. What my sister didn't do was seduce her ex's new girlfriend, which was what I had done when Alice left me for someone we both had a crush a few months after we started dating, back when we were young baby dykes, barely out of the closet. I tried to explain this to my sister and she couldn't fathom how such a thing could happen. These things don't happen to straight people. Your boyfriend might leave you for your friend or your co-worker or your cousin, but if both parties are through and through heterosexual, you will never find yourself competing for romance with an ex. No, these things only happen to us.

In this particular situation, I spent the first few weeks after Alice left me chain smoking on my front stoop with a quickly disappearing bottle of Perkaset. When that ran out, I cleaned myself up and began the surprisingly simple task of breaking up the new couple. At a party one night, Alice's new girlfriend Sal and I decided to talk it out—to process, as lesbians are wont to do—which, naturally, turned into a making out on the hood of a neighbor's truck. Soon after, Sal left Alice and started spending nights in my bed. But I didn't like Sal as much as I liked Alice. She had a bad haircut and kissing her was like having a banana slug lie down in your mouth. So I went back to Alice, who was, to my shock, willing to have me back even after I seduced her girlfriend. This, of course, reinforced my teenaged belief in destiny. We, I thought, are meant to be together. We can can survive all transgression, any sin.

Alice's birthday that year fell in the weeks after she left me and before Sal left her. A mutual friend of ours, someone who hadn't heard about our split, called to get the details of Alice's birthday party. “I heard there's going to be kickball,” she said, “and a keg. Should I bring anything?” I stayed in bed that day. My sister spooned miso soup into my mouth, like what was killing me was a simple and easy as cancer.

It's been six years since that first breakup, two years since the last. I don't really date queer women anymore, preferring to act out that terrible Katy Perry song where she kisses another girl but doesn't feel bad about it because cheating doesn't count if it's with a woman. There was the 21-year-old débutante who wore a gold cross around her neck and made me sneak out the back door before her sorority sisters woke up. There was my 36-year-old boss whose son I heard ask in the morning, “Mom, who's in your bed?” There was the ex-Jehovah's Witness who asked me if I thought Jesus was sad over what we had done.

I'm okay with being someone's experiment, someone I don't have to think about after I leave. But every time I wake up beside a new woman, I pause for a moment before opening my eyes, wishing for just a second that the woman beside me isn't the one I met at the bar last night; wishing it'll be her, it'll be Alice, returned from the past and ready to forgive. But it's never her. So I write letters instead, seal them and stamp them and put them in a box in the back of my closet with the other artifacts of what we once were. The painting of a monkey I gave her for her 24th birthday; a bracelet from Mexico, another from Peru; the Polaroids we took on our move across the country, the two of us young and unknowing against Mt. Rushmore's wooden faces.

It's just my sister and I now, like it was in the beginning. She's 5'5”, I'm 5'6”. She's in patent leather shoes, I'm in snow boots. She thinks of men and wishes there was just one good one to call her own. And I think of her, of Alice, of this stupid, sad exile from the one who loved me violently, the one I can't forget.