Growing up, I often told people I know who my doppelganger
is. It didn’t seem farfetched to me, since, I am an identical twin, but then a
recent event got me rethinking that stance, and even thinking about a few
things that have happened in the past.
The recent event was I was shopping with my sister-in-law
and a woman I did not know started talking to me as if she knew me.
Needless to
say it threw me for a quite a loop because the last time that happened to me
was somewhere between 1997 and 1999 when Konnie and I were living in the same
city only a few blocks from each other. Now of course, we live in different
states.
I actually considered maybe the woman I saw was nuts, until the last couple of days when I recalled a few more instances. The first two
happened while I was at college in Rexburg Idaho and Konnie was at home in
Tacoma Washington.
The first incident was that one day, as a friend and I
arrived at a meeting for a campus club, one of our fellow club members asked me
if I’d been in the downtown area that afternoon. I had, so I responded that I’d
been shopping. She then glared at me and told me I nearly ran her over in the
crosswalk!
I told her she had to be mistaken, since I didn’t even own a
car, let alone have a current driver’s license at the time. She still insisted she
was positive I was behind the wheel of the car that nearly ran her down.
One week later, my friend and I left to get to that same
club meeting earlier than usual. Since, by then I was hobbling around crutches
we wanted to give me plenty of time. Anyway, when my accuser from the week
before entered the room, she, and the friends she was with, did a double take,
completely dumbfounded, because they were positive they’d just seen me walking
AWAY from the building our meeting was in sans crutches or cast. To which my
friend turned to me and said, “You mean there’s three of you?”
Something I had clearly forgotten when that woman approached
me last week. But I’d also forgotten one other event.
This one happened not long after my husband died, and even
just a few days after Konnie had returned home from attending his funeral.
I’d gone to the store to pick up some sandwich fixing. It
was the first time in years, I’d even done the shopping, and I hadn’t done it
without my husband with me in so long that at one point I stopped to look for
him.
That’s when I spotted her. For one split second, I thought I
saw someone familiar, then I realized the size, shape, and hair color was
right, but it couldn’t possibly be Konnie!
I never approached the woman, never talked to her, but I now
I know, she must live in town somewhere.
And all that got me thinking about how it feels to discover
you do have a doppelganger and wondering if writers ever use that issue in
their stories.
I for one have a couple of doppelgangers in my WIP, but that
fact is backstory. I don’t have the actual event when they discovered this
issue in the story.
Have any of you ever written such a scene? Have you tried? Do
you know of any such stories?
I think I’d like to try some time to write a scene where my
main character is mistaken for his or her doppelganger, and I think I’m going
to have it that they are not twins separated at birth, and are not related at
all. But then again maybe not, since them not knowing they could even have a
twin, or such a relative would make for a more intriguing story. Don’t you
think?
Happy writing everyone!
