Sometimes I wish that I wasn’t a twin. I wish I didn’t have to share everything… my birthday, my clothes, my friends… what I look like. Don’t get me wrong, when I was younger, I loved not having to worry about not having someone to sit next to in class on the first day of school… and I feel awful now that I’m older and don’t feel the same way… the way I probably still should feel.

It’s never just me or I, it is always: us, we, twins, the Wu’s, Wu crew, Wu tang clan, Wu-hoo-woo-hoo-hoo… or something like that. I’d like to say I’ve always been annoyed with never being an individual, but that would be really hypocritical, I mean, my user name for teen ink is ‘Twin2’. In away I like that I don’t have to have speak up, in away I can not say any words and still be heard loud and clear, in away it’s a luxury that no one else even has the opportunity to possess. But I don’t see it as a gift. It’s not a lump of coal that I found in my stocking, but more a like an ancient computer found under the tree Christmas morning: always here, sometimes needed, sometimes wanted, but always and forever loved.

When I was little I remember I’d lie in my twin bed—ironic name isn’t it?—and my sister would lie in hers just a foot away, and we’d take turns thinking of animals and having the other one try to guess it by clues, when we ran out of animals we’d move onto numbers instead. It wasn’t always fun but I remember playing that almost every night until we got to middle school. In eighth grade we both started to complain to out parents that we never got to be alone, and we just needed some space from each other; that summer we finally got separate rooms after twelve years. To present day, we haven’t been away from each other for more then a couple days, because of the year we went to camp, but even then we could see each other from across the dining hall. In the future I wonder what’s going to happen when we both graduate high school, and move to opposite sides of the country for collage. What am I going to be like when half of me is miles and miles away, the one who’s been with me forever and always? Will I still be myself… will I end up being so different after the four plus years of collage that our words won’t click like puzzle pieces… that our laughter won’t match like identical Lego’s… that we won’t be able to finish each others sentences like a dictionary and a thesaurus… that we, our selves, won’t fit together like Twin #1 and Twin #2.

Friends have asked me: when you have kids do you want a boy or a girl? How many? They always ask me if I’ve ever thought about having twins. But the chances of having identical twins like us in America are 0.4%... so it’s almost considered a freak of nature, or a miracle. So yes, I have thought about it, and no I do not wish to have a set of twins. I love my sister more then I could ever love anyone, but I don’t want to make my child fight for something that they should rightfully get in the very beginning, something that that they shouldn’t need to fight to make it different from their identical, something I should strive for, even if I don’t always need it or don’t always get the chance to use it: a voice.