[PLEASE READ DEFINITION & DESCRIPTION FOR MORE DETAILS]

You are a young adult of 21 years. You’ve graduated university and are planning on moving out at some point soon, but for now you’re still living with your parents. You were looking through the attic, trying to help clear some stuff out when you come across a box at the back that looks like it’s been there for around 20 years given the dust and cobwebs on it. The first thing you pull out is a birth certificate dated for the exact same day you were born. “Strange” you think, given you know your birth certificate is downstairs and not in some dusty box in the attic. You keep reading and see that it is a birth certificate for a girl named ‘Gwen’. The details all seemed right too. Your parent’s full names. The right hospital. The right date and time. But how can this be? You keep looking and open an old photo album which seems to be filled with baby pictures. Your parents have never shown you any of your baby pictures from your first year of life for some reason, but here they were. Pictures of baby you from your first few days of life and right alongside you in almost every picture was a baby girl the same age as you.

You needed answers. You needed to know what has happened to Gwen. You take the box downstairs and confront your mother with it. Upon seeing the box and the confusion on your face, she can tell you need to know. She sits you down and begins to explain what happened to Gwen.

She confirms that she is indeed your twin sister. She confirms that you were indeed born dying and that the doctors and nurses managed to save you and you had to take a lot of treatment after that to completely treat you. However, along with the strain it takes to raise two newborn babies, your condition added a lot of strain and pressure on your parents mentally, physically, emotionally and financially. But then after a year it was discovered that Gwen had a heart condition that would need treatment. Your mother confesses that they didn’t think they could handle everything anymore, and give us the lives we deserved. So, they did the only thing they saw they could do, and gave Gwen up for adoption. They chose you over your twin sister.

The news hits you like a train and leaves you stunned. Is this why you’ve always felt incomplete and like something was missing? Because your other half, your twin has been missing your entire life. Your mother tells you that she doesn’t know where Gwen is and asks you not to try and find her, as she doesn’t think it would be fair for “the girl” to find out this truth and learn her biological parents gave her up. You can see her point, but you can’t help but want to find out what sort of life she’s had and if she is ok.

After some digging in private, you manage to find her Instagram and see the person she has become and the life she has lived. She was taken in by a single mother named Alice and raised alongside Alice’s children, meaning she grew up with two older brothers and a younger sister. In every picture she looks so happy, smiling with the same smile you’ve seen in younger pictures of your mother, and with the same eyes you have. You decide you want the chance to meet her. You reason that you are both adults now, so have the right to choose for yourselves and don’t have to follow your parent’s decision to not have the chance to at least meet each other. You begin by reaching out to Alice, explaining who you are, the situation and asking if you can meet your twin. After a series of messages and a couple of meet-ups, a date is set for you to finally meet Gwen.

You pull up to the address she grew up in with the people she thought was her biological family. It was a bigger and nicer looking house than you grew up in, which you can’t help but feel a little envious about, along with the fact she grew up with siblings, whilst you grew up alone. Nervous about how this first meeting might go with the twin sister you’ve never known about or seen since you were a baby, you walk up to the front door and knock, waiting for someone to answer.