scandent raze when i was a teenager, at least three different people told me they had a cousin or a friend who had a brother who looked just like me. close enough to be my twin. one of my supposed twins had blonde hair. i wanted to see pictures, but no one was ever able to produce photographic proof of my face on someone else's body. i saw my dad's twin once. i was at a spitfires hockey game. i was twelve. there was a man sitting in the stands across from me. he had the same hair as my dad. it was cut the same way. he had the same glasses. the same face. even the same moustache. the only details that broke the spell were his blue spring jacket (my dad wore a brown leather jacket) and his grey hair (my dad hadn't started going grey yet). i watched him talk to the guy sitting next to him all night. i can't remember a thing about the hockey game, but i could draw you that face. and i can't even draw a realistic-looking spoon. i wanted to walk over there and ask my dad if he dyed his hair, or if he had a fight with an x-ray machine and walked away a negative image of himself. then i heard his voice. it was all wrong. too high. too thin. it wasn't him. i've seen people i know in people i don't know, but i've never seen myself in someone else. or maybe i have but i didn't know it. you probably wouldn't have any idea if you ran into your doppelganger, would you? what you see when you look in the mirror and what other people see when they look at you are two different things. the closest you can get to seeing yourself through someone else's eyes is in a photograph, and that doesn't cut it. it's a flattened-out representation of a three-dimensional object in a constant state of flux. still. there must be someone somewhere in the world who looks enough like you, through some genetic or cosmic fluke, that they could step into your life if you ever died in a freak skiing accident and the producers responsible for the soap opera you've been starring in needed to recast your part right away. for the right amount of money, maybe your unwitting double would say yes. but it wouldn't really be you. it would just be someone who looked like you. they would probably have to work with a dialect coach to get your voice right. unless they were born with vocal cords that were identical to yours. that could happen. they might not like your clothes, though. they might think they could do a better job walking around inside your life than you ever did. and that's just disrespectful. you wouldn't do that to them. you'd get in, give the best performance you could, and get out. retire to some secluded spot in the woods. spend your days chopping wood and talking to your basset hound and sitting on your cabin's front porch, rocking yourself to sleep in a chair made of long-stemmed woody vines, taking care to steer your thoughts from the question of how many lianas had to die in servitude to your comfort. 211130 what's it to you? who go blather from