I looked into the mirror and saw my twin sister’s ghost dancing on my face four months after she died. We didn’t share a face, but I could see her in mine, she could see me in hers. I’d taught my eyes to focus on anything but the reflection staring back in mirrors. That day, I was careless. When I looked up, her ghost danced on my lips and my cheekbones, reminding me some bonds survive death. She had died on a cold day in November, on the same day we’d come into the world thirty-two years before. Most come alone; we didn’t. I came first, Sam ten minutes later. Dying, though, was a solitary affair. I was 2,000 km away when the call came. She was still warm to the touch when they found her; life left her body slowly. Phone calls, flights, and tears shed in waiting rooms followed. Later, I stood beside the casket and held her cold hand. Hoping it wasn’t too late, I whispered a reminder into her ear, to send me a sign when it was my turn to cross over.

The elders I asked about twins could no longer remember all the things our people used to know. We lost our ways of knowing, unable to trace a clear line through history. Years ago, Sam and I met one of our maternal great-uncles, an old man with cloudy eyes and grey hair, who’d lived a full life. He’d been a twin too, but his brother died at birth. He’d lived most of his life as if he came into this world alone and yet the absence haunted him. There was a shadow lurking in his eyes. You could see it if you looked closely enough. A lifetime hadn’t dulled the pain. The loss frightened us. 

My mother had discovered she was carrying twins late in her pregnancy. Ultrasounds weren’t easily accessible to young mothers in the Zimbabwe of 1985. But the child she was carrying kept her bent over a bucket with sickness in her throat. It hadn’t been like this with the ones who came before. Her doctor ordered an ultrasound and a giddy technician pointed out the two shadows on the screen. My mother’s sister told this story at Sam’s funeral. After we buried her; a cousin shared an early memory of us, the twins, running away from bath time. Two giggling, joyful toddlers running through the house on Erica Hepburn Street. Would the way Sam died erase all these moments that made a life?