by: Jessi Hafer

To ensure that Oprah or some other person with a nation-wide, tug-at-your-heart strings kinda show (if you’re into that kind of thing) doesn’t try to contact me, I need to state at the outset that I’m not looking for my long lost biological twin.

That said, one day I was out running errands, borrowing a friend’s car since I don’t own a car (for real). A friend from work (we’ll call her Coworker 1) called me and said, “I just saw you go by on your bike, why didn’t you wave?!”

I hope no one in the store saw me, because I’m sure I made a weird face. “I haven’t been on my bike all day,” I explained, “I’m out running errands. I borrowed ‘so and so’s’ [real name removed to protect the innocent] car.”

She didn’t believe me, but I insisted that it wasn’t me. She said that the person she saw was biking down Van Ness and had a blue bike, a smooth black helmet, long-ish hair, and black and white stripped socks. We had a good laugh about the mistaken identity, and I didn’t think too much of the situation [yet].

Then, the next day at work, a different coworker (Coworker 2) asked me if I had been biking the previous day in the Blackstone/Shaw area! I told him that it wasn’t me, but someone else had seen the same girl and thought she was me as well.

A couple weeks later, the Coworker 1 saw her again, and then she and another coworker (Coworker 3) saw me, I mean, the girl who isn’t me, on Van Ness yet again. Coworker 3 said we even have the same bike-riding posture.

A week after that (today, actually), Coworker 2 saw me, I mean, her on Blackstone again.

It’s always funny when someone sees her, and we all joke about how I have to find this girl. I had a certain roommate in college, and we had discovered after living together for months that we had the same birthday. Though we looked absolutely nothing alike, we joked to people that she was my twin from a parallel universe and that if we ever so much as touched, the entire universe would be destroyed (ah, those crazy college days). I lost track of her (it’s probably safer anyway, for the good of the universe), but now apparently I have another twin. And duh, I just realized that I work with one of Fresno’s glorious independent media sources, so I actually have an avenue through which I can track down my twin without Opera’s help.

So if you know a girl with a blue bike, a smooth black helmet, longer hair, a preference for red shirts and black skirts (Coworker 1’s second sighting), and black and white striped socks, and if you know that the girl you know isn’t actually me, please tell her that she has a twin. If strange people are waving at her, it’s because they think she’s me. Though it might be fun for us to meet each other, maybe even trade lives for a day like on Parent Trap or something, we have to be careful not to so much as bump into each other so we don’t destroy the universe.