Every night, he crawls into my bed. I never deny him. He is so much a part of me that my arms open, welcome him into my embrace, without a second thought. Our limbs wrap around each other immediately, into a new arrangement that tangles and shares comfort. I know the jutting of his hip against mine, and fingers that clasp my close cropped hair and tug rhythmically; I know soft skin blemished in different places to mine with freckles that join to form a different picture; and I know that in sleep, he snores to tickle my cheek with his breath.

All this I felt. All this I understood. I never realised he did not see us in the same way I did.

I always assumed that our similarities went beyond our appearance, so I never considered the physical tension between us. After all, we were of the same blood, the same deed - all that set us apart were minor personality traits such that we could be identified as individuals briefly. So often I believed we were one, but doubled.

But no two people are ever completely the same, no two people hold the same thoughts, same desires. I never sought to define the difference between us - the difference harder to convey between two people who have become accustomed to being one entity - and it became our downfall.

For once it is you who falls asleep first, right after he crawls into your bed once more, as the ritual now goes. Him, pillowed on one outstretched arm, brings pins and needles that usually keep you awake, so that you watch him doze snuggled on you. But tonight, you feel heavy with sleep, your eyes barely able to stay open past the obligatory shuffling that permits his lanky body, the same size and shape as yours after all these years, to fit into the curves you create for each other. A hand rests on the slightest dent of a waist; legs are thrown over each other, tucked under each other; faces are turned so you can hear each other breathe, and feel its warmth even while asleep. Signs to assure the presence of your other self.

But the signs are deceiving, they are manufactured for your own belief, because tonight you sleep, and you feel nothing amiss. Only with the tightening shrug of your hands, brought up past your ears, do you wake with a face full of clean sheets. You never sleep on your front - from childhood, you never sleep without your faces and bodies angled towards one another, as you try to do now. But cannot - bonds tighten on your wrists, and ankles are snapped back to position by cutting swatches. You call for him, your gemini brother, you call his name in the dark; and the answer you receive is the maddening weight of a body lowered to yours, chest to back. You would shout, but this is your brother, almost you; so you panic inside instead. You are naked, you can feel that he is naked too, pressed against you, not making a sound, but enough noise in the quiet to remind you of how alive you are, how alive he is. The thud of his heart against your spine, the pounding that is as rushed as yours, but yours beats in fear. His harsh breath, hot on one ear - he makes no move to approach but hovers, breathing in/out/in. This you have so heard many times in your shared life, but now it quickens specifically in response to you, to his treatment of you, and this you have never experienced, never sanctioned. Revulsion tides in you - he is your twin yet he is aroused by what he has done to you, is doing to you; but he is your twin and is blood. Is love. It is evident in his caress of you, the soft burble from his lips that builds in coherence and volume as his breath hitches and his hands begin to wander. You struggle, but it is weak, though you are as strong as him - your bodies honed together by summers of sport of training of fun of games of you, and of him - but he has you bound, to the bed and by your love for him.

This is what he wants, and you acquiesce. You let him take.

He is gentle, but he is rough. In his excitement he forgets that the body he touches is not his, though it looks the same in this near-light. He forgets you do not know of what he is doing, that you are not ready for this assault. In his haste he enters you prematurely, fingers slicked with lubricant perfunctorily swabbing your tight passage moments before he sheaths himself in you, surrounds himself with you. Your body explodes, and your world with you. At once it is hot, it is wrong, it is haze and pain and white as you black out at the suddenness. Dimly you are aware of him fucking you, balls meeting cheeks, stroking in and out of you with piston-like rhythm, but there is no music in this act. Maybe you shed tears, maybe you wish to shed tears, but nothing you do makes a difference here. He has you pinned beneath him, his groans from above form mutters that grow to shouts, and then it is over with the bucking of his hips, and you shudder together to an inglorious halt. He clutches at your shoulders with digging fingers at his climax, pulling welts so that you bleed rivulets, which both of you ignore: him, for he is sated and gasping a sheen of sweat on your back; you, for you are made of nothing but pain.

Tonight my twin brother sought his independence from me the only way he could comprehend. I can neither judge, nor deny; but for the first time I see that I do not understand all about him, nor will I be able to do so from this day hence. Tonight, he brought us closer than we have ever been before, for he let me into his dark depths, and I am afraid.

If he needed me I would always have been there for him. But his need bled into his want, and his love for me darkened into a proprietory predatory sense. For he saw that my feature were his, and craved to take back that part of him; but my body is mine, and no matter how he runs his hands over me it is not his, not his body, not in tune with his desires.

Once joined in the womb; joined, tonight, by violence and shame. We break, we part, we shatter what we are into a million irreparable pieces. We, forever bound, but one no more.

END