Part 2 of Entry into “Speakers Ball” Challenge:

http://cherispeak.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/speakers-ball-bloggers-challenge/

It started with a dream, though I never realized it until I grew up.  When I was old enough to remember my dreams, my waking mind would occasionally wander to a young girl in the background.  As I grew older, the girl began to grow older too.  It didn’t matter what the dream entailed, she was somewhere around.  She was playing in the background, running through to chase a lost balloon, a fellow student sleeping in the back row, and hundreds of other forms that I glossed over in my mind.  Eventually, I thought it was nothing more than a standard character that my subconscious cooked up and used to give my dreams more life.  After all, she never interacted with me and she had never uttered a single word.

The day the dream became reality was when I returned home from college.  My parents were at work, so I made myself comfortable after being away for four years.  Summer sessions and trips over break meant I only saw my family for holidays, which never gave me time to wander the old house.  So, I took advantage of the quiet solitude and explored the house like I was a child.  Only this time, I was a taller child who could reach the top of the book shelf and find his baby book.  It was blue and covered in enough dust for me to not even consider cleaning it in the house.  Taking it outside, I wiped and shook the dust off, my grip loosening enough to let an old picture fly out.

With a swift grab, I manage to catch it before it falls into the mud and found myself staring at my sonogram picture.  The surprise was that there was a second child in the sonogram with me.  At first, I thought it was a ghost image, but I never heard of a ghost image being in a different position from the original.  One child was stretched out while the other was curled up behind and they were obviously different sizes.

I confronted my parents at dinner and was surprised to find that they weren’t as evasive and sad as I expected.  They openly admitted that I had a twin sister, but they were only able to afford one child.  It was a difficult decision that my dad joked about ending with the flip of a coin with me being heads and my sister being tails.  The truth is that they knew an older couple who were unable to have children of their own.  They had discussed and agreed on who would get which child and promised to keep in contact.  Being young and scared, my parents let them pick and the woman claimed that she always wanted a daughter.  It was a decent plan that would have had us growing up together, but my father found a great job in another state.  So, they stayed in contact through letters and pictures with neither set of parents willing to reveal the truth to me or my oblivious sister.

My parents revealed three shoeboxes of pictures of the little girl from my dreams.  Now that I had a better look at her and a large mirror to examine my own face, I could see some of the resemblance.  A matching nose and chin with matching hair color, but her being a her made the similarities very subtle.  I’m guessing we could pass for each other when we were children if we wanted to get matching haircuts and clothes.  It would have been a fun trick to play on our teachers until we got caught.  At this age, we look more like regular siblings or close cousins than twins.

So, now I’m left with the choice to contact her or not.  My parents and her parents are at the point where they’re fine with the way things are.  I guess I have a sonogram and pictures to scan into the computer and an e-mail to send.  Hopefully, she gets the truth from her parents and I don’t come off as a creepy guy who escaped from a mental ward.  I’m sure things will go well because if she’s anything like me, she’ll be curious and have seen me in her dreams too.