Sunday, July 24, 2011

She Looks Too Much Like Me

by Shauna Miller

I joked about our age difference the first time we hung out. When Kurt Cobain died, I was in a pub in Germany. She was in the second grade. I made some crack about watching MTV News and feeling old. She was pretty cocky about not knowing who Kurt Loder was.

She was 23, opinionated, and emotional, with lots of orange hair on top. “Fiery” is the word I think I assigned the overall package. I liked arguing with her. She made me nervous. She had complicated hobbies, like making her own beer and playing archaic musical instruments. She had big, passionate ideas about what was wrong with the world and how to save it. We met while volunteering, because that's how every lesbian meets every other lesbian in Washington, D.C.

She also had my haircut. To be fair, I had her haircut, too. Doppelbanger Syndrome—banging one’s clone—is a scourge of the lesbian community, and we had a critical case: same Bieber haircut, same thick-framed glasses. “You guys sisters?” everyone wondered, from pervy guys to sweet old ladies. D.C. doesn’t really do butch-femme, so there we were, left to haggle out the gray areas in the same dressing room at H&M.

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