Fact: I'm Either Julia or Mariah

Once, quite early in my freshman year, I was in the hallway, weaving past a million other kids on the way to a class. A blonde-haired girl walking past caught my eye, gave me a smile, and waved to me. I had never spoken to her or even seen her before, so I found it to be tremendously confusing. Engulfed my tremendous confusion, I didn’t acknowledge her at all.

A few days later, my twin sister, Mariah, had a story to tell me. She said she had been in class having a conversation with some people and had mentioned that she had a twin offhandedly. One of the girls claimed to have seen me, explaining a time when she thought she had seen Mariah in the hallway, waved to her, and got only a strange expression in return. I was shocked.

Back in the good old days when my mother would get my sister and me routine to-the-chin haircuts and dress us in similar clothing, I could let it slip if I got mistaken as Mariah once in awhile. After all, I was a little kid, and most of those things look the same anyway. So if you called out “Mariah!” it’s quite likely that I would look in the direction of your voice, solely from habit.

But it doesn’t make sense anymore. Mariah is brunette- my hair is like a dusty corncob. Mariah’s eyes are hazelish green, my eyes are brownish brown. I’m about two and a half inches taller than her. When Mariah’s wearing one of her formfitting girl-shirts, I’ve probably thrown on my baggy black Weird Al Yankovic t-shirt. Even the less noticeable differences- Mariah’s freckles and rosy complexion in comparison to my flat, pale skin; her dainty, size seven feet and my size 8½ Vans– should be a tell-tale sign. It is completely baffling to me that somebody could mistake me, without the knowledge that Mariah even had a sister, much less a twin- for Mariah.

For a long while, I had a theory: perhaps it was their psyche. Perhaps being aware of the fact that two people were twins made them look exactly alike through the eyes of a person, and made it possible for the person mistake the twins for one another. The word “twin” brings the image forth of two things that are identical- carbon copies. I began to wonder: did simply knowing of our twin-ness cause people to identify our faces as the same face?

I really thought I had something going, but that girl in the hallway ruined it all for me. She, independent of the knowledge that Mariah and I were twins, picked me out of 2,700 faces to be Mariah. Now that my theory has been shattered, I am left only with something that makes no sense… could Mariah and I actually look alike?