My twin called this morning to ask what I was wearing.

“Seriously?”

“I need to know.”

We’re forty-three. He just can’t give it up.

My brother is deeply into twin lore. Twinness has been his obsession since birth. He reads every book on twins that comes out, even the scholarly studies and the coffee table photo books of twin faces. He tells me what the birth of twins signifies in African cultures, how twins are revered in Japan. He understands my unease with being a twin, but he can’t help himself.

“Twins separated at birth grow up to be more alike than twins raised together in the same home,” he told me once.

I rebelled against dressing identically at a young age. I would strip off any and all matching outfits. My mother would fall into tears whenever I did this. It was such a struggle for her to get two young boys dressed, and there I was disrobing immediately.

And, making matters worse, my brother would follow suit and take off his clothes, too. He wasn’t rebelling against parading around town in matching attire. He was just doing what he always did: copying everything that I did.

One day I refused to speak. We must have been ten or so. Our parents and older sisters were amused, but my brother was not.

“I’ll get him to say something,” my brother said. “He’ll talk to me.”

But I wouldn’t. No matter what he did. No matter how hard he tried. I wouldn’t speak.

Finally, he said, “I get it. I get it. Mute twin.”

Our parents died about six months apart, when we were thirty-two. I came home for their services, and both times my brother tried convince me to move back home, to live with him in his condo. He was worried for me, he said. He wanted me to settle down, stop working in nightclubs moving from one city to the next. He asked me if I mixed myself an identical drink for every one that I served when I was tending bar.

That’s right. I’m the alchy twin. I’m the twin with the purple nose.

After he got married, my brother doubled his efforts to keep in touch with me, despite my frequent moves. My brother married a twin, Crystal, and they have no children. They’ve been on the wait list for some time to adopt twins from China.

I made the mistake of giving him my cell number and he began calling me every few days, always asking me if I had just been thinking of him. He believed that our thoughts were synchronous. When he thought of me, I must be thinking of him, and vice-versa.

He was so lonely, he said. “I really miss you, brother.”

I once briefly dated a twin, myself. Her name was Denise. Her twin was a brother. His name? You guessed: Dennis. He was a bit of a crossdresser, she told me.

“Mostly he dresses as a woman to do karaoke,” she said. “I’m telling you now so you don’t get freaked out if you see a six-foot version of me walk into your bar some night.”

This is the moment I should have told Denise that I was also a twin. But I didn’t. I quit my job at the club the next day and got a bus ticket to Las Vegas.

When I was in rehab for the third time in two years (court-ordered), my brother sent me a new suit so I would look my best when I checked out. Like the Minnesota Twins cap he had sent me years ago and all of the souvenir t-shirts he had air-mailed to me from his travels, I knew that the suit’s twin hung in his closet and that he would be wearing the suit, a thousand miles away, on the day of my discharge.

For me, being a twin feels like living between French mirrors, trapped in deep, endless reflections. For my brother, being a twin—he said to me once—feels like having four legs on the ground. Like no wind could knock him over.

My brother’s communication with me now is a tolerable few emails a week, mostly forwarded items about twins in the news. Some I read and some I delete as soon as I see his favorite subject line: Twin Thing.

But there was something too urgent in his call this morning—asking me what I was wearing. I had the feeling that he was ramping up to come at me hard one more time to move back home, to live within his reach.

“I think about you all the time,” he said before I hung up on him.

I typed the message quickly and didn’t have a second thought before I hit send:

By the time you read this, I will be dead. Brother, I am sorry. But tonight I am going to kill myself.