#18 Match

Mirror images, they seemed to be, when my mother and aunt — Yiyi — were younger. Grandma often dressed them up in matching outfits like dolls and gave them the same black bowl haircuts, as though their features weren't similar enough.

There's a photograph of them on the shelf above the living room television, wearing loose-fitted black and white checkered skirts with white double buttoned ruffled tops. The photograph captured their impish eyes that darted around, studying their surroundings like they were fish in an aquarium.

On school days, the twins left their split apartment while it’s still dark, moving their way through the ‘tong laus’ and newspaper vendors to catch the bus for school in Kowloon city. They arrived just before seven, when the dulled blue sky is tinged with splashes of egg yolk. The light against the brick walls made pink purple shadows that followed the twins as they ran through the campus labyrinth. They were cartographers, plotting the patches of grass that reached above their knees. When the wind blew east, they collected snappy twigs dotted with flowers that had fallen into the courtyard. When the sun was higher than usual, they looked behind heavy wooden doors for geckos who froze for a moment before scurrying off. Rainclouds visited and the twins squatted in the middle of the corridors, counting the dawdling snails.

They lived in a reversed bubble. It wasn’t the twins who were looking out at the people from a world of their own, but that everyone else was in their own individual bubbles and the two of them were the visitors at the world’s fish tank.

*****
A little story that I first wrote in 2017 (rewritten for the prompt), about the twins in my family 👯‍♀️