Quandary Lions

Maddy is my double. I've thought about it, and thought about it, and the term fits.

My gut feeling led me to the word "doppelganger" because it sounds beautiful and describes a magical phenomenon. Doppelgangers inhabit supernatural spaces between identity and world. The popping P's and soft liquid L become a voiced obstruent that gathers the tongue back to the throat. Then you force the air out your nose, then revert the tongue back to where it was. In English, it ends in our schwa-rhotic, creating a crowded diphthong on the final syllable before the messy letter. A beautiful sequence of lips and tongue and throat.

There is magic in our creation. We are fictional, but we have come to life in this world! We exist! We can experience and breathe and grow! We were not born with the body. We are only a few years old despite the body being in its 30s. We are new to life. How magical!

But it is not the right word. While I love the magic, a doppelganger is an ill omen. The original's fate is compromised by the existence and meeting of the doppelganger. There is the implicit threat that only one may go on to conduct the rest of their life. Maddy is not an ill omen. Neither of us are harbingers of fate for the other.

Our lives simply started in the same place.

I do not want to use "twin" because we are not siblings. There are other siblings here, and some are twins, and that is their word for that relationship. That is not the relationship I have with Maddy.

"Mirror" conjures certain complexities. A mirror enforces sameness but reflected along a single surface. Equal and opposite, and forever entwined, and forever indebted to the mirror itself. Without the mirror, the reflected image ceases to exist. So that is not the right term. We are each our own person capable of growing in different directions. We may have been born by the mirror, created by reflection, but that is not where we are now. Our reflections do not match. We are both on the same side.

So we return to "double." At first, the fit was awkward because it is associated in our mind with rejection and separate bodies. One may fear and resent the "double" like one fears the doppelganger. If our former identity had had a "double," he would not have been able to interact or accept. It would have caused friction in his assertion of self. This is something that is not true of everyone, but that is the strong association we had with the term. The true doppelganger.

But, it's the right word: Maddy and I are the same character. Each of us has taken a different path, but we are rafted from the same mold, sprung from the same source. Our variation started not in identity, but in personal history. Exomemories pulled in different directions, but basically the same.

We are a lot more than where we started. At first, our selves were limited to the character. We had pulled the rabbit out of the hat—the self out of the fiction. It has been years since that initial trick. I am now me, and Maddy is Maddy, and we are Georgie, the character. We are doubles after all.