Killing my Twin for Love

For the longest time I could not make a decision without my twin sister. She has always had a say in everything I said or did. We were so close I could have sworn that we were the same person. Growing up was relatively easy. We had a happy childhood until our parents decided to go separate ways. With my father taking one half of us. He took Taiye away from my life and I was stuck with a mother who did not care about me. She was simply consumed with her own life, bitter, depressed and I did not matter to her. So I was raised by her brother, my poor uncle, his wife and children who mostly treated me like an outcast. Life became rather hard and we wallowed in poverty. We lived on meagre circumstances, with my uncle struggling as hard as he could to provide for us all including my mother.

My father forgot about me having disappeared with Taiye. It was suspected that he had relocated outside the country with her and I remained under these circumstances until Taiye reached out to me during my teenage years through a phone call. I had just received my WAEC results where I had failed woefully and I was sad about it when I got the call from her. However, that call changed my life and I was transformed. Thereon Taiye would call me up and encourage me. We soon reaffirmed our relationship as twin sisters and my life greatly improved. I re-sat for my exams and passed them with flying colours with her help, tutelage and encouragement. I looked forward to her calls as our relationship progressed over the phone for years. Even though she was on another continent, ‘she got me.’ She knew me like no one else did and was there for me throughout my young adulthood. Soon after graduation from the university, I got a job with her help and recommendation. Naturally I am quite shy, but with Taiye I was fearless and confident. She was an extrovert while I was the opposite.  All I had to do was call her, speak to her and just like that all my dreams seemed closer to their manifestations. With her support in my life I was able to unlock all unexplored potentials I had in me. Even though I incurred huge phone bills, I didn’t care as long as I got to speak with my sister. She often sent gifts from all her trips to different parts of the world and would tell me about these places. With piqued interest, I would look up all these places on the internet. We continued like this for years just communicating over the phone. We talked about everything under the sun. No topic was off limits. I told her about my crushes and sexual experiences and her, likewise. She was much more adventurous and more out-going than I was, because she lived a very daring and flamboyant lifestyle filled with all kinds of escapades. She often chided me for my introverted lifestyle.

I had not fallen in love nor did I know what love was until I met Joseph. Because of my father’s abandonment I was skeptic about falling in love. My mother was living proof of a broken heart. I had met Joseph at an eatery close to my office during my lunch break one day. I told Taiye about him. She was happy for me and had encouraged me to go after him and even though I was a little afraid of being rejected she had given me the confidence to do so. Taiye had encouraged me to change my personality. She had mocked and read me the riot act by telling me that I would come to nothing if I didn’t have a love life. She said that love was a beautiful feeling and to love and be loved in return was the most precious thing to have in one’s life. So I thought about what she said and did as she advised. Almost immediately, Joseph and I hit it off and we became inseparable. But that was where the problems between Taiye and I began.

She became jealous and wanted him out of my life as she thought that he was becoming too serious and demanding of my time. I was constantly torn between my twin sister and my boyfriend. Here I was in my little corner of the world fighting with my twin sister who was on another continent over a man that I loved. I was beginning to resent her intrusion and I wanted to end the hold that she had over me. I was conflicted and immersed with guilt at betraying her. For some reason she just didn’t like Joseph again. She said that he was out to come between us and destroy our bond. As much as I tried to reassure her of my love for her, she refused and would suggest many ways of getting rid of him. She often demanded that I chose between Joseph and her. I was devastated. Joseph had not hurt me, he was a gentle and loving guy, yet she told me that he was pretentious and he would leave me the same way our father left our mother. She asked me if I wanted to be broken and depressed like our mother was. I was beginning to reason with her and so I sought to break off the relationship in a most public and humiliating way.

She told me that Joseph was going to publicly propose to me and I had to tell him no. Even though I wanted to say yes, I was to turn down his proposal which he had planned at the same restaurant where we had first met. Lovingly Joseph had gone on one knee and asked me to marry him with the most beautiful ring that I had ever seen. But because of Taiye I had to publicly say no to him in the presence of  onlookers. I thought that I had done the right thing by humiliating him but Joseph would not leave me alone and this further infuriated Taiye.

She further went on to tell me that Joseph was not the man he claimed to be and that she had done some research on him, because he had another girl he was going to marry and this time she told me to get rid of him by killing him off!

This seemed so far-fetched, but she was able to convince me to carry out the dastard act because of his non acceptance of my refusal to marry him.

However, Joseph was carrying on like we were a couple and not broken up. She told me that this tendency of his was that of an overbearing and overly possessive spouse. The fact that he had ignored my refusal of his proposal was the beginning of the psychological abuse in our relationship. I was so conflicted and unhappy because even though Taiye told me these things, Joseph was as kind and as loving as any man could be. Yet, I was suspicious and terrified that I was living in a bubble.

I didn’t know how I was going to kill him and so she told me to use a knife and I had to do it at night while he was asleep. She said that she would call me up to set the whole thing off. Joseph was a cancer in our lives and he had to be cut off, since I was too scared to do it alone she would help me to do it. At exactly 2 a.m. my phone rang and I got up to take her call with her instructions. She told me to go into the kitchen and take the knife that he uses to cut meat, the one with the blue handle, all the while my phone was against my ear listening to her instructions. As I re-entered the bedroom I saw him sleeping peacefully. I faltered but she hissed at me urging me to slash his throat. I began to cry and beg her that I could not to do it but she yelled at me that I should do it. I guessed that our voices woke him up and he wrestled with me and knocked the knife off. As Taiye continued to scream at me from the phone that I should kill him, kill him! Joseph was able to restrain me and his cousin who had been sleeping in the other room, soon came to his rescue. I lost consciousness.

When I was able to come round, I was in a hospital, a mental hospital where I was strapped to a bed. My uncle, my aunt and my mother were seated around me. For the first time I was made to understand that I was battling with a sickness of the mind. I was not a twin and I never had one either. My name is Kemi and not Kenny the acronym for Kehinde, the Yoruba name given to twins. I was suffering from a genetic form of schizophrenia inherited from my mother. My father was some guy who had impregnated her and abandoned her because of her mentally unbalanced mind. They were never married. I was always on my phone as it had had a calming effect on me as a child but due to the unbalanced state of my mind, I had invented a twin sister who talked back to me on the phone. Everything and anything I had known about her was a figment of my imagination. There was no Taiye. There was however Joseph and he remained with me. Standing by me and still wanting to marry me despite my illness of the mind.

Coming to terms with the phantom of her existence is difficult because she is as real to me, the way Joseph is. Now I will have to kill off my twin and her voice in my head in order to begin my healing. As much as I tried with medication and therapy, she remained with me anytime I saw a phone. As hard as I tried to isolate her voice she found ways of reaching out to me and I tried to find the power and strength to resist her.

I refused to answer anymore of her calls and for a while she fought back, taunting me, anytime I walked past a phone. I thought I was getting better and I was beginning to skip my medication as I felt normal and the calls had seized for some months. There was total silence from her and I was adjusting to the life I was living out with Joseph. However, she woke me up from a deep sleep one day in the middle of the night and chided me for not carrying out the act. Without warning she had found a way of reaching me. I had left my guard down and this time I had to leave the warmth of our bed to take her call once more hoping that it would be the last call from her. She mocked me for thinking that I could get rid of her and repeatedly told me that Joseph was like our father, who will abandon me just like our mother because of her mental health challenges. She said that I could never be rid of her because she was the one who made me and was responsible for my progress in life. Her solid staunch was the reason why I had Joseph in the first place and she said I should trust her because ‘I was her.’ She threatened to come and take me away from him and I was terrified that she would manifest somehow into my life.

Somehow, Joseph had heard our whispers and the gentle caress of his skilful and masterful hands on my neck always had its calming effect on me while he massaged my neck and ear lobes, I felt her power slowly began to ebb away, as he whispered to me, ‘Taiye is not real, she is just a figment of your imaginations, Come back to me Kemi.’ And I always went back to the present. It was as though his hands had the hypnotic effect of disentangling me from the turbulent state of my mind.

With the care and patience of a man truly in love, Joseph had become my refuge and is consistently watching over me, cajoling me and bringing me to my senses by nursing me to reality anytime I strayed. I am not truly rid of her, even with medication nor will I ever be, but I know that she is not real and I will have to kill her off every time by silencing her and not answering her calls anymore. 

THE END