Twin Mirror Shadow

The first time Li An met Lin Jing was amid the surging crowd of the People's Square subway station. Like two identical water droplets colliding unexpectedly in a rushing river. They were both wearing khaki trench coats, both wearing the same style of beret in different colors – Li An's was off-white, Lin Jing's light gray. They even nearly bumped into the same pillar while looking down at their phones. The moment they looked up, their eyes met, and the air seemed to freeze for a second.

"Excuse me," they said in unison, the hurried, apologetic tone identical.

Then, they both froze, staring at each other as if looking into a sudden, living mirror. The same face shape, the same eyes, even the tiny, almost invisible mole on the left eyebrow was in the same spot.

Lin Jing smiled first, a sense of wondrous fate in her expression: "We... look so much alike."

Li An smiled too, the irritation born from the crowd instantly replaced by a more complex emotion: "Yes, what a coincidence."

That phrase, "What a coincidence," became the beginning of their friendship. They exchanged contact information and discovered that not only did they look strikingly alike, but even their names seemed to echo each other – An and Jing, peace and reflection. In the days that followed, they became the closest of "sisters with different surnames" in this vast city.

They rented apartments in different old residential complexes, yet both loved going to the same independent coffee shop on weekend afternoons for an unsweetened oat latte; they both shared a deep aversion to cilantro and a penchant for niche Nordic noir dramas; they even found out that both had inexplicably feared carousels in childhood, feeling the stiff-faced wooden horses hid some ominous secret as they spun.

They shared the trivialities and highlights of their lives, like reading a book written about themselves. Sometimes, Li An would feel in a daze that Lin Jing was the other half of her soul, lost somewhere in the world. This feeling was so strong that when Lin Jing excitedly talked about a newly discovered obscure bookstore, Li An could almost blurt out its name and its location deep within some maze-like alley.

"How did you know?" Lin Jing's eyes widened in surprise.

Li An paused too: "I... I think... I dreamed it?" She wasn't sure herself if it was a dream or some memory hidden deep within her bloodline.

Time flowed silently like sand in an hourglass for a year. Their similarity was no longer the initial surprise but had become a mundane backdrop. Until one day, while sorting through old belongings, Li An found an infant photograph. The photo was slightly yellowed, showing a chubby baby girl in pink swaddling clothes, clutching a stuffed rabbit with one ear missing. Li An had always thought it was her only childhood photo, the sole memento given to her adoptive parents by the orphanage.

That evening, she invited Lin Jing for dinner. When Lin Jing arrived, she brought a small, newly bought succulent, calling it the "twin" of the one on her balcony. Looking at the two nearly indistinguishable plants, something suddenly pricked Li An's heart. She took out her phone and showed the baby picture to Lin Jing.

"Look, wasn't I cute as a baby?" she said, feigning casualness.

Lin Jing leaned in to look, initially smiling, but her smile slowly froze. She snapped her head up, her eyes filled with incredulous shock. "This rabbit..." she pointed at the one-eared stuffed rabbit in the photo, her voice trembling slightly, "I... I have an identical one at home, also missing the right ear..."

The air froze again, heavier this time, more suffocating than in the subway station.

Silence lay between them like a thick sheet of glass. The "similarity" they had treated as a joke, as fate, now revealed its stark and true face.

The investigation that followed felt more like a script preordained by fate. They went to the orphanages where they each grew up, searching through dusty archive rooms. The clues were fragmented and vague, like the diverging paths in a Borges labyrinth. The orphanage records were ambiguous, hinting at some confusion in the intake procedures back then. Finally, in an almost forgotten old file folder, they found a record, hastily written, mentioning twin baby girls separated and sent to two different institutions due to extreme family hardship. The names listed were starkly "Li An" and "Lin Jing."

The truth struck like belated thunder, splitting open the past twenty-odd years of their lives. They were truly twin sisters. The year of intimate friendship, the inexplicable telepathy, the startlingly identical habits and fears—all now had an answer.

Logically, this should have been a joyous conclusion. A reunion of long-lost sisters, a magical twist of fate. Like the heartwarming reversals common in O. Henry's stories.

However, as they stood in the sunlight, looking again at the face identical to their own, what Li An felt wasn't pure joy, but a deeper, Kafkaesque sense of absurdity and confusion. Looking at Lin Jing was like looking into an inescapable mirror. For the past year, she thought she had found a soulmate, someone who understood her best, only to realize she had merely encountered a copy of herself.

Lin Jing seemed to feel the same. She gently touched the mole on her eyebrow, whispering, "So... those unique thoughts I had, those quirks I thought were mine... they weren't really 'mine'?"

Discovering they were sisters didn't make them feel 'whole'; instead, it made them feel 'diluted'. Who am I? Does that unique 'I' even exist? Or are we just two random variations of a genetic sequence, destined to reflect and cancel each other out?

The city remained noisy, the crowds still hurried. Li An and Lin Jing walked side by side, still dressed in similar styles, still making identical expressions unintentionally. They had found their roots in blood ties, but in a way, they had lost the 'self' they once believed to be solid.

Their reunion wasn't a simple period, but more like an unsettling ellipsis. In this vast city full of coincidences and labyrinths, their story is perhaps just one footnote among countless tales of identity, mirrors, and existential wonderings. Sunlight streamed through the gaps between tall buildings, falling on their faces, half in light, half in shadow, like their current indescribable feelings. They are sisters, friends, and also each other's eternal, bewildering mirror images.