By Carol van Strum and Jordan Merrell
As famous and at times as notorious as I have been my whole life long, I am the great unknown. And these are the times when mankind thinks there are no secrets. “Technologies have seen to that,” they say. For the common folk, perhaps. But me? When I want to be known, I am the Talk of the Town. When I want to feed my ego in the eyes of those who “love” me, I go that route. I’m only human.
Secrets? I’ve got plenty. That’s why I laugh at everyone but myself. Nearly everyone “knows who I am” or thinks they know. The fools! They know nothing, I tell you, nothing at all.
Do they know where I come from? Do they know the burdens and scars a soul can bear from knowing you were to be taken out under a desert moon to be murdered at birth? A sacrifice!
Yes, a sacrifice. My parents were in a new cult and “god spoke to the followers.” That’s one of my secrets. I don’t speak of my “birth” family, or of the fact that I’m a mirror twin.
“You must pick only one.” Their God commanded them to send some old man out into the night with me, “the different one,” to spill my blood to please God. Christ on a crutch! How am I supposed to feel about that? I had to go to therapy!
Were it today, would I have been left in one of the plastic bins, shoved into the warmth of one of the “Baby Drop Slots” we see everywhere? I doubt it. And with my emerald green eyes, milky skin, hair in curls the color of cornsilk, I’d be chosen now over my brother – his eyes black as olives, skin the color of a walnut roasted next to the hearth. More the pity, I have my “curses,” my own Cross to Bear.