“I doubt the meaning of my being until I think of Sonia…
Isn’t that what makes me want so badly for her to belong to me?”

Until our birth, almost everyone had their own personal space in the womb of their mother. It seems so natural that no one gives it much importance. But in my life it happened differently. I was fortunate to share the body of a mother with my twin sister Sonia.

Back in 1995, my parents, a generation of post-Soviet society, were extremely passionate about esoteric movements. Mama decided to give birth at home, in the bath tap. My sister Sonya overtook me and decided to be the first to be born ahead of me for 20 minutes and took the status of an elder, the fact that undoubtedly influenced her character. It was a fierce January. But even this didn’t stop my parents from continuing their experiments. A month later, in February, parents began bathing us in the holes of a frozen lake. Water became a natural environment for us and we quickly learned to swim.

We were not separated until we were six years old and father left the family. That turned into a dramatic experience for both of us. Around this time, I started to want to separate myself from Sonya. I didn’t want to have a person who looks and behaves like me – no more. Children’s friendship gave way to a struggle for parental attention and fostered an atmosphere of competition.

When I was 13 years old I moved to live with my aunt Zina, and Sonya remained with mother. This cemented the foundation of the wall between us. Sonia was genuinely hurt by this, and I was absolutely unable to appease my teen- age egoism.

After 10 years of breaking up, at the age of 23, life brought us together again. It wasn’t easy. My desire to love her was rejected under the pressure of past experiences. Today, we try to build this connection again and again. We feel this struggle – wanting to be at peace with each other and at the same time not being able to be with other. Every period of our life we reach out to each other and then falling apart. We live this life with a longing to overcome traumas, complexes, childhood reactions, to return to the state of things where nature created us as one.