To Have a Mind of Your Own

My parents named me Sofia-Dafne. Sofia, for what they intended to call me, and Dafne, for what they would’ve called my twin, had I not unfortunately absorbed her in the womb twenty years ago. They also generally believed it was a pretty name for me to bear, a nice tribute to what could have been – but what my parents don’t know is how fitting that name actually is.

People first started to realise something was unusual about me when I began to talk well enough to have conversations. Naturally, as with any child, when I got to this point, people were eager to quiz me on things, try to deduce the personality I might have in the future. What was little Sofia-Dafne’s favorite color? What about her favorite food? What toy did she want to play with that day, and did she know why?

Whatever questions they asked me, once given time to think, I would always – without fail – come up with two answers. Typically, one would come first, and I would announce it with more confidence. For example, if you asked me my favorite color, what I would first say was purple. But then I would pause, screwing up my chubby toddler face like I was thinking, and add, as if on second thoughts, that my favorite color was blue.

At first this wasn’t strange – what kid wouldn’t change their mind every now and again? But the strange thing was, I’d always say this. Always purple, a moment’s pause, then blue. As if it was programmed into me. And it was the same for other questions, too – my favorite food was strawberries, but after a few seconds, it was the finger sandwiches my mum would make for my teddy tea parties.

However, although this was unusual, it wasn’t exactly alarming. My parents would be dismissed within minutes if they went to the doctors saying that their daughter always gave dual answers. She’s just indecisive. It’s nothing to worry about.

It didn’t get any worse than this for a few years: it wasn’t until I was at the age where I began to have more of a – well, a conscience, a mind of my own, supposedly – that people really started to point fingers. This began when I was about five or six when, along with the relentless double opinions, I’d began to admit to strange things. One time, my parents asked me why I always gave two answers, and I professed it was because I heard a voice in my head. A little girl, about my age – but not me. I said she didn’t have as much… power as I did, but when I thought about certain things, she thought about them, too. So, I’d always give her answer, in addition to my own, when asked things.

Some parents would’ve freaked then, either because they thought their daughter was hearing ghosts, or more likely because they thought she was mentally ill. Hallucinatory, maybe, or childhood schizophrenia. Then they’d have a reason to take me to the doctors. But my parents just sighed in relief. Laughed, actually, at how silly they’d been the past few years: nothing’s wrong with Sofia-Dafne! She just has an imagination. She has an imaginary friend, like lots of other children her age.

Though I knew what I heard wasn’t imaginary, I didn’t even realise exactly what it was until a couple years later. It was my eighth birthday, I think, and I was eagerly opening presents, distracted by the endless tide of gifts (there wasn’t really that many – I just liked to picture there was two of everything, for some reason I didn’t yet know). I suddenly became aware of the silence when I wasn’t tearing wrapping paper, and looked up to see my parents smiling wistfully at me.

“What?” I asked, sticking out my tongue.

My mother sighed, glancing at my father. “We’re just imagining what it would be like if your twin was here,” she said, and proceeded to explain, in simplified language, what had happened to my sibling that should-have-been. My attention was completely torn from the gifts by now: my mind was captivated by the idea that I could’ve had a second me, a partner in crime. And I couldn’t seem to wrap my head around the absorbing part – how could I have just merged with my twin, leading them to cease to exist, never to be born?

“We like to think you would’ve had a sister,” my father explained. “We decided we would’ve called her Dafne – that’s why we gave you two first names. You were going to just be Sofia, and your sister would’ve been Dafne.”

Dafne. Something about that name stirred something inside me. It made me think, but what if? What if my twin sister was here? What if she was the voice that I had always heard, the second, slightly dimmer personality I had always had?

But something in me also told me that it wasn’t a good idea to say that aloud. My parents would just make me feel silly, give me some big-brained scientific reason as to why my theory was absolutely not possible.

But if my twin was inside me, and she had influence over my thoughts, my feelings… that would mean my body was not really mine. Not completely, anyway. And it never would be, unless I got rid of her.

This was the moment that changed it for me.

Now, aged almost-twenty, I have been trying to murder my twin sister for the better part of my life.

I’ve not told my parents. They’d freak out.

As you can probably tell – purely from the fact that it’s been over a decade – my attempts have not been successful. Why? Because selective self-destruction is hard. How am I supposed to kill off the parasite in my brain, without killing off myself, the part I want to keep – to free – by accident?

For many years, I confess, I was too scared to even try. I only theorized. Experimented a little. I wondered if I got sick, did it weaken both me and Dafne? Or just one of us? The answer to that question I could probably assume would be the same for death, too.

Petty sickness bugs, colds, headaches – they weren’t enough. The voice inside me seemed to groan, but that could just be because our activities were restricted. So naturally I was delighted when I got food poisoning and could really test out what I desperately hoped to be true. I was ten, and my two-faced nature was really starting to make it difficult to make and keep friends.

The results from my test were as follows: I was pretty sure the voice has gotten quieter. But it was hard to tell, because we share a body that was definitely sick.

I kept up the tests like this for a few more years. I passed a kidney stone a few months after the food poisoning, and had appendicitis a bit over a year later. Those were the main ones; the results were essentially the same as the first one.

I was fast approaching my thirteenth birthday when I decided to try my first murder attempt. I’d been planning different ways all those years, so once I decided I wanted to try, all I had to do was pick one. The plan was to hold fill a bath and hold myself under until I felt Dafne’s presence slip away.

It didn’t work. Unfortunately, my mother called me for dinner – and when I didn’t reply, came looking for me. She unlocked the bathroom door from the outside – it was one of those locks where they were more for stopping people accidently opening the door on you than actually safely keeping you shut inside – and caught me just as I had passed out. She wrapped me in a towel, yelled for my father, and together they managed to wake me up. They took me to hospital for good measure. Then got me a therapist, even though I tried to persuade them I just fell asleep in the bath. It’s for your own good, they said.

They also kept an annoyingly close eye on me after that, convinced I had become suicidal.

I don’t have a death wish, I wanted to scream. Not for myself, at least.

Was it too much to ask for them to leave me alone so I could just kill my sister, now I’d finally gotten the murderous guts to try?

 When I could, I tried different things again. Drowning was a regular, but I always got paranoid my mum would find me again and keep an even closer eye on me, and kept coming up to the surface to act cool when I thought I heard her coming. I tried eating raw eggs and undercooked chicken in the hopes I’d catch salmonella or some other poisoning. I tried to stock up to overdose on painkillers, but someone would always find it before I could build up enough to be a lethal dose. When I was eighteen, I got the closest – I had a knife, and I was going to do it – but I had second thoughts. Even if Dafne died first, my body would continue to bleed, and I would join her with death soon after. I would only have seconds, maybe minutes, of freedom, and it would be spent in agony.

You’d think I would’ve given up eventually. Surely, having lived my whole life this way, I would’ve just gotten used to it by now, like someone born with an extra finger or half an arm might. Like a pair of conjoined twins might – I suppose that’s the most similar thing to mine and my sister’s condition. They might have once hoped to change it, but chances are, they’ve accepted its their life now, and have learnt to be happy with it. Of course, most people born different who want to change don’t tend to attempt fratricide countless times to change it, but the analogy still works.

But I didn’t. I didn’t give up. The more times I failed to kill Dafne, the more I hated her, the stronger my need to destroy her grew. I couldn’t help it – you’d probably do the same, too. It’s the desire to be free which can make someone do the most terrible of things. It’s just human.

Though I never gave up trying to kill my twin sister, but in the end, it wasn’t even a successful murder attempt that ended her. I find this quite cruelly amusing.

Well, not ended her. Not really.

It was as simple, as accidental, as this: I was walking home at night and I wasn’t looking where I was going. I’d learnt that sometimes not thinking at all kept Dafne quiet for a bit. I crossed the main road that my house stood on one side of thoughtlessly. When I noticed the swerving car hurtling towards me, it was too late.

It’s funny, because after wanting to die – to kill Dafne, I mean – for so long, when death finally came, I only felt fear. I guess that’s natural with humans. The enormity of after is too daunting to comprehend – even when life is awful to us, it’s still more familiar than what will happen once it ends.

Anyway. The car hit me at such as speed I can’t even remember the pain. I died – I can’t put it poetically. I just died.

When the ambulance came, the paramedics found the ravaged body of a young woman. It was a truly miracle, they say, that they managed to save her. It made the headlines.

Because who would have thought it – the results from the experiments I did as a pre-teen were not reliable. Maybe I had just been naïve, or my darling sister had been tricking me all along. I had thought the weaker spirit in me would die first, but no – it was my body, so it was me who was ejected. The better fraction of me was the part that managed to live on, you see.

My parents named me Sofia-Dafne, but though I have two first names, they say I’ve seemed half a girl since my accident.

What they don’t know is how fitting that actually is.