5 Years

I’ve watched her for so long. It’s been 5 years.

I know everything there is to know about her. I know her name, where she lives, where she works, and the restaurants she likes to eat at when she doesn’t feel like cooking. I know her friends, her enemies, her family and her colleagues. I know the road she takes into the main street, just a few hundred meters from her house. I know she likes her eggs with the sunny side up, and her hot chocolate with exactly 5 marshmallows in it.

I know all there is to know. I’ve always been there.

We used to be the best of chums once upon a time, always together, inseparable. We lived in a world of our own, with no one but each other. Like two peas in a pod, we complemented each other to a degree one would have thought impossible. It didn’t last for long, however. One day, the complementing got a wee bit too far, and we never spoke again.

Despite everything that happened 5 years ago, I still cannot be angry with her, at all. I love her so much that I can’t even hold a grudge against her. Hell, it breaks my heart just to see her go about her day without me. I get so jealous of all the other people who took up the posts I used to occupy; the people who now laugh and cry with her; take her out to cinemas and dinners. What makes it even more terrible is that my name, once so closely associated with hers, is not even mentioned anymore. It’s like I’m faded, not even important anymore. Maybe I’m supposed to think about it as unfair, even despicable, but sometimes I think it is for the best. I think it hurts her way too much to remember me, and us. She couldn’t exactly help her choices back then.

I know she remembers us sometimes though. Every now and then, she takes out our photographs and goes through every single one with tears in her eyes. She goes on little trips too; visiting our places, our café, our favorite shop, our picnic table in the forest. I listen to her sob and apologize to me over and over again then. Here she is now, sitting on the picnic table we used to occupy whenever we came out to the forest.

In these moments, I really wish I could go to her and lend her my shoulder, tell her everything’s okay and that I was never angry to begin with but I cannot. What would she think of me? So I stay where I am and watch as she sobs and pulls out the newspapers from the days when we were one. I look on as she relives our final days as friends, poring over the news articles we used to discuss over the breakfast table.

Those days were hectic for her. She had just gotten a job at a new company, and her boss, with whom she’d been involved in the past, was bothering her. I kept asking her to let me take a look, to talk to the man but she wouldn’t hear of it. She wouldn’t let me protect her and she wouldn’t protect herself for fear of losing her job. Things kept escalating and she kept coming home with tears in her eyes, but refusing to tell me whatever had passed in the office.

One day, I convinced her to at least take a leave from her work. I took her out to the seaside she loved so dearly. It worked, but not well enough. She’d just freeze over in the middle of laughter, or get panicked and ask me to go back into the hotel as we strolled. The shadows of fear still loomed over her.

I spoke to her desperately, pleading with her to please just resign. We’d change homes, even towns if need be. Nothing was too difficult if it meant I’d see her happy again. Finally, I got through to her, and she called the company secretary to tell her that she’d be submitting her resignation as soon as she came back in two days.

The sky began to clear. Everything was so beautiful, so good again. She started to smile and eat again as we looked at new houses we could possibly move into. We even chose one, a lovely flat just a few hundred meters from the main street.

On our last day, I went out shopping to buy organic food to take home while she slept back at the hotel. As I came back, laden with heaps of food, I realized a car moving slowly through the streets, with its driver squinting at shop windows, probably looking for an address. I went over to ask if they needed help. The man stared at me in amazement and knocked on the window separating the backseat from the front. A man, tall, dark and menacing-looking hopped out, smiling down at me.

The face was familiar but I couldn’t place it.

“Think you could run away from me?” he growled as I gulped. This could only be the boss.

“Leave me alone!” I said, shoving him away and briskly walking in the opposite direction afterwards.

“What if I don’t want to?”

I stopped and stared at him. He held a gun in his hand, loaded and pointed towards me.

“Get in the car.”

I walked away coolly, having called his bluff. Of course he wouldn’t shoot.

The man said some things behind me, with increasing anger, but I couldn’t exactly place it as I walked farther away, my nerves easing as I went farther.

I did place the sound of the gun though, a moment before I dropped onto the floor, spewing my vegetables everywhere. He got me by the throat and left me to drown in my own blood.

Even as I died, I couldn’t think of anything but the fact that I couldn’t even tell her to run away.

Of course, it made newspaper headlines. Why wouldn’t it? An error like this was certainly rare.

“Wrong twin!” reads the headline on the newspaper my sister’s holding in her hands right now, dated exactly 4 years and 364 days ago. Leave it to the newspapers to make something so awful sound funny.

She reads it, like she always does today and gets in her car afterwards.

I know where she’s going. It’s kind of a yearly routine.

She’s going to the cemetery for my 5th death anniversary.