The first thing you need to know is that they were not identical, but that they looked identical, kind of even dressed identical. Like nobody ever told them that they didn’t have to wear hats and ties to class, and then remove the hat when walking inside. They had a sense of duty that kept them from the conclusion that they didn’t really even have to come to class. That you could smoke a joint on the school lawn for godssake and forget all about Advanced Topics in English Literature and go down to the lake with your friends and that you could tell your professor this and they’d probably laugh.
The first thing you need to understand is that they were both different, but more from everyone else than each other. That they had seen more B-Grade horror flicks than I had seen any movies whatsoever at all. That they had in fact, in their possession, their own personal plan of escape in case of zombie apocalypse and that there were meet-up spots and maps and lists of potential places to hide, and even the necessaries like a flashlight, granola bars, and a bat. I was taking psych 101 so I told them that their plan for zombies was really an exercise to make themselves feel better about not fitting in so well and an escapist fantasy. Don’t think I was insensitive though. The boys were both deeply empathetic and vulnerable but they were not deluded. They knew that there was nobody quite as perfectly like them as one another and that they were “those who are totally not at all like others.”
I decided to be his first girlfriend and that meant less parties, since they didn’t like parties, and less drinking since they didn’t like drinking but more constructing robots out of cardboard that we scrounged and making movies about haunted VCRs. He could draw real good, like a 50’s cartoonist or something and he would draw me little mad scientists with jars full of eyes and he’d write stuff like “I only have eyes for you” and so I loved him pretty well and he did loosen up and start fitting in better which I think made his brother sad since he had right just then dropped out of school because something inside of him just couldn’t make it work and he would sleep all-day. I did try I think to make them both happy. (Because they couldn’t be happy if the other one wasn’t) But in the end there was rock and roll music and real Grade-A movies at the Cineplex and I wanted to skip class and not have a blue eyed fedora wearing detective boy disapprove of me so much all the time and then fall so hard back in love with me when I told him that I changed my coat buttons so they’d look more like hard candies. So I left and it hurt him so bad that they both never did speak to me again at all and after the initial breaking up hurt dissolved I was almost surprised to find that I had a live coal of hurt in my gut that would never extinguish. I missed my friend, who had deadened himselves to me.
I stayed around after graduating, and they lived outside of town so I guess they were around too but I never saw them not really and I would get updates from friends of friends and at first they were very bad and then they were good and then there were no words at all. One day, two years later, before I moved south forever and always I saw him walking through town. I almost called out to him. Raised my arm. Wanted to say…but I dropped my hand, and let him go.
The first thing you need to know is that they were not identical, but they looked identical, and that I felt identical.
And so we nuked the fridge.
and jumped the shark.
and if they can make art into schlock.
I can make schlock into art.
