As if that explains everything.
As usual, Jake misses the point. He skims the top off things. Sure, what happened was that we both sleepwalked to the train station at the same time. And had the same dream. And talked and talked. But that was just the cherry, the whipped cream. Down deep with the hot fudge and ice cream was what else happened. What really happened. Which was this: we became ourselves. I know, it sounds weird. But it’s like, on the train in the Moffat Tunnel that night, not quite all of us was born. I mean, it looked like all of us was born. But something was missing. The knowing. We didn’t know who we were. Not really. (The important word there is we.) We just went along with the program for the first six years, being but not knowing ourselves. Being “twins.” To everybody else: adorable, mysterious twins. To ourselves: Duh, so what’s the big deal?
And then we awoke that night hand in hand at the train station, and it’s like the rest of us was finally born. We knew. At last we knew. We saw ourselves like everybody else saw us. It suddenly hit us: we’re different!
It’s like a beautiful present had been sitting there for six years and we never noticed it and then finally we did and we tore it open and…wow! The present was us.
So what exactly is it that we finally knew?
Well, we knew that not everybody can hear their brother from five miles away. We knew that not everybody yells, “I’m stuck!” when it’s happening to somebody else.
Okay, that’s what we knew about everybody else, but what about us? What did we finally know about us?
We couldn’t say—we could only feel—because there were no words. It’s like, whatever it was, it existed on the other side of words. So if you were following us on the way home from the train station that night, you wouldn’t have heard regular, full-sentence talk. All you would have heard were scraps, like “Did you see…!” and “What a fantastic…!” and “Do you believe…!” And that’s about all. Because the rest of the talk was happening between our heads, not our mouths.
What an amazing night, the night we unwrapped ourselves. Before we knew it, Jake pointed to the sky and said, “Look—it’s morning!” We had been circling our block all night—two six-year-olds in July in pj’s and bare feet. We raced for home. The front door was wide open. We ran to the kitchen, grabbed cereal boxes and bowls. We were just starting to eat—hard to do when you’re gulping giggles—when Mom came down.
She nearly fainted. “What are you two doing up? You’re never up this early.”
“We’re too excited to sleep,” Jake said.
“It’s our birthday!” I said.