About Face
On August 27th 2010, for the first time in my life I would be separated from my twin sister, Sarah, for a longer amount of time than either of us had ever experienced, she would dorm at the University of Connecticut, while I would stay home and attend Baruch in the city. For as long as I can remember we were together. We had surgery together, we took the SAT’s together, and when our mom and dad got divorced we were together.
Going to different colleges, however, was not the first time we had been torn apart. It seems that as we have gotten older we have begun to spend less and less time together, developing our own interests and making our own friends. For the first years of our life we went to thesame preschool, elementary and middle school together, sharing the same friends and doing almost everything together, but when it came timeto choose a high school we went our separate ways for the first time. I decided that I wanted to go to Bronx Science, while she had always wanted to go to St. Francis Preparatory School. At this point, anyone who knows anything about high schools in NYC should be thinking, how could a pair of twins end up going to such different schools? For anyone that has never heard of these two big schools, Bronx Science is known for being one of the seven specialized public high schools in NYC, while St. Francis Prep has more of a reputation for being the largest catholic high school in the United States and having one of the most active and social student bodies of any high school in NYC.
The reason we went to such different high schools was because, as it turns out, even though we are twins, we are also two very different and unique individuals. In fact, many who have met us both, including many life long friends, have told us that we are the closest examples of polar opposites that they have ever seen. While I never considered myself to be a social outcast, and my sister was always an Astudent, the parts of our personalities that dominated us were always very different. While my sister spent her weekends going to parties and having a social life, I spent most of my free nights watching movies and playing video games. In fact, the only reason I probably got to go to any awesome high school parties was because my sister invited me to them. Without her I’d never have experienced what a lot of people consider to be an important part of adolescence.
Even though we had our fights and we didn’t always agree with each other we had remained close throughout high school. We had always spent time together, despite our differences. I even like to think that because of our differences we were both able to shape each other in different ways, which would have been impossible if we were boring and identical.
It has been exactly one month now since she has gone away to college. I try to pretend that I don’t miss her, but its hard not to. I try not to think about it so much, but I can’t help it. I can’t help asking questions, now that she’s gone, whose going to get me into awesome college parties, who am I supposed to hang out with during family gatherings, whose going to drive me to Starbucks when I want to get a Chai Tea Latte, and most importantly, whose always going to be there to understand me when I fall down or things get hard?
