Creative Cloning

author's note: only half of this post is true and it's up to you to do the math.



.... too much of something is bad enough... says the Spice Girls in their song Too Much

The Spice Girls became famous when i was about 9 or something then. everyone on the campus went loco over their songs and their clothing preferences or fashion as they like call it. i didnt quite get why they were so crazy over girls who have over production of female hormones. Its just that even when i was still a little kid, i already had another thing for music that kids my age didnt usually have. i didn't go for the likes of these girls and their kind of music. i went for the vertical horizon (was that the band at that time? I dont really recall. . .) kind of bands.

Well anyway, Ive never been a fan of the Spice Girls but a line in their song got me. . .
One night, I was in my room reading the last chapter of Da Vinci Code when I suddenly saw this familiar figure outside my window. She was staring right at me. I got closer to the window to inspect who she was. A pang of shock greeted me as I clearly saw her face. Thats why I thought her face was familiar; she looked exactly like me.

Well not exactly, considering her pimple which is similar to mine was found at her left cheek instead of the right and her bungs were tucked in her right ear instead of the left. But still, she looked exactly like me.

She was like my identical twin, but she couldnt be. I didn’t see her growing up with me. It was surely unbelievable and there was certainly no possibility that she was my twin. And then it occurred to me what she might be.

So after I somehow regained my composure, I found the chutzpah to finally ask her something that had been running around my mind since our encounter, “Are you my clone?” She didn’t reply though. She just kept staring at me. For me, silence can mean yes, so I took her silence as a positive answer. I couldn’t believe it; she was definitely my clone.
The ice broken, I started throwing questions at her. I asked her what her name was, who her parents were, where she lived and how many brothers she had. Half of me expected her to vanish and the other half expected her to say she was a top-secret experiment of the CIA. But she stunned me when she answered every single question without any hint of hesitation. It took me aback when instead of introducing herself, her reply was like hearing someone reading my own bio-data. She was thinking and speaking as if she was me.

Since I liked talking to her because it seemed like talking to myself, I kept chatting with her every night for months. Talking with her was getting to know myself once again. We discussed a lot of things and I noticed that she was indeed my clone because we both love coffee-crumble ice cream, long stemmed white roses, strawberry-melon shake, cool shades of blue, black Chuck Taylor shoes, and white sand beaches. Also claiming to be a movie lover like me, she had also seen all the movies that I’ve mentioned like Finding Neverland, Ocean’s Twelve, An Affair to Remember, Girl Interrupted, Spy Game, Harry Potter sequels, Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Matrix trilogy. I even agreed when she said that the best character in LoTR would surely not be overly heroic Frodo or cry baby Sam, but the amusing mentally ill Golum; and that it was disappointing to hear that action star Keanu Reeves had married the X-Men star Alan Cumming.

I even discovered that she also has the same taste in music like mine. She had been listening to Dashboard Confessional, Daphne Loves Derby and The Used ever since her brothers, who I had claimed to be also mine, influenced her.
She really had a knack in claiming my possessions including the weblog that I had developed. She claimed to have owned http://www.nullfour.blogspot.com/. She wasn’t just stealing my possessions, worse she was stealing my identity. I had created that weblog to vent my feelings and ideas. How could she claim it?

I couldn’t take it any longer so I decided to take a step forward. I told my mother who, according to my clone, is also her mother. I reported being cloned, telling her that this could be one of those strictly “classified” experiments done by the US Government to ordinary kids from other countries. I never really expected her to believe me, but still much to my dismay, she just stared at me as if I’ve lost my mind and said, “Honey, wake up! You don’t have any window in your room. I think you have a Dissociative Identity Disorder or what we know as Multiple Personality Disorder. That’s it, no more TV; it’s ruining your mind.”

For the first time in my life, I locked myself in my room. I felt the whole world upon my shoulders. i knew that no one would believe me so I went to the window where I would always see my clone at night. she would believe me because she was my clone. after all, i would believe myself.I kept on hearing my mother’s voice. And it struck me like a bolt of lightning. That was why my clone kept silent whenever I was silent. That was why sometimes we talked about the same thing at the same time. That was why she returned every scrutinizing look I gave her. That was why her bungs were tucked on her right ear. She was no other than me, my reflection.

grrrr... i should have known better!

After what seemed like a lifetime of thinking and laughing, I concluded my thoughts. My mother was right. I’ve spent so much of my time watching television that I’ve developed a mild case of Dissociative Identity Disorder.

I still have an advice to all the TV addicts though. Don’t look at the mirror, you might get so creative that you would think it’s another person.