I’m minding my own business when I walk right into the path of my double—my own doppelgänger.

Everyone is supposed to have one, you know. And mine, well, I’m a little disappointed that she isn’t as pretty as I like to think I am. She has some flaws, and they’re obvious right away. Her nose is a little bit offline, for one thing. And she’s wearing red cat-eye glasses—I wear contacts—that sit a little bit crooked on that crooked nose. She’s also dressed with no style whatsoever, not at all rocking the saggy brown wool coat, in my opinion, and the thrift-shop flowered blouse. Her jeans are threadbare. Her hair is a bird’s nest of frizzy Miss Clairol Shimmering Sands Blonde.

We look at each other.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“I’m sorry.”

And that’s it. She doesn’t seem to notice the likeness.

I can’t help it. I let her walk a bit farther down Chestnut Street before I start following her. I’m in front of a bin of onions on the sidewalk in front of the little market when she stops and looks behind her, and I have to spin and feign interest in scallions. I hold a bunch up and inspect it. She turns around and keeps walking. And soon I know where she lives. She lives above the nail salon in the next block, because she has a key to the iron security door, and she goes right in.

It’s so weird, I know. But I take the next week off work and stake her out. I can’t get over it. She’s me, but different. We’re like some amoeba that split a long time ago, each part taking a different path, though genetically identical. I want to think that I won that particular competition. The next few days make me wonder.

I admit it. I’m high-strung. I’m high-maintenance, according to the several boyfriends I’ve accumulated over the years. I’m always worrying about something—my job, what’s going to be happening, what should have happened but didn’t, what people are thinking about me, my looks. And I’m pretty, or at least I thought I was, but when I see the way my doppelgänger lives over those next few days, I start to realize that she is free and I’m trapped.

She always bursts out of her place with a big smile. Bright red lipstick. Her hair is always an emancipated mass atop her head, gathered up with bits of string, yarn, rubber bands, a bag clip, whatever she has handy. Her clothes are as eclectic as a Hollywood studio wardrobe collection. She’s clearly always herself.

Me? I’m any number of people, as situations require. It’s. So. Much. Work.

I watch her from across the street as I sit with a coffee and envy her. I follow her some more, in and out of shops, down to the park, on walks with her dog—a happy sort of labradoodle guy. And I piece together that she’s single too. In the evenings, no dude arrives to take her out. No dude emerges in the early mornings, fresh off a night of casual screwing with Miss Free n’ Easy. She’s alone. And she’s fine.

I can’t take it anymore. When my week off is almost over, I put myself in her path again and wait for her to arrive in the space right in front of me.

I say, “Hi. I’ve been seeing you around.”

“Oh, hi,” she says. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Jan.”

“How wild is that?” she says. “I’m Jen.”

“No way.”

“Way!”

I laugh for what has to be the first time in weeks. Months maybe. She asks if I live nearby, and I say no, but I hang around there a lot. She asks if I wanted to grab a coffee with her, and I say sure. And we walk side by side straight to the coffee shop where I’ve been watching her from.

I buy. I figure it’s the least I can do for my doppelgänger, who so far seems to have no idea that we’d look exactly the same if we … carried ourselves the same way.

Because I’ve taken a close look in the mirror that week, and I’ve noticed that I do have kind of a crooked nose, and my hair does go frizzy if I don’t iron the shit out of it before I go out. I, apparently, have flaws too. The difference is, Jen doesn’t care about those things and I do. Way too much.

I ask her straight up: “Hey, don’t you think we look an awful lot alike?”

She smiles, then bursts out laughing. She throws her head back to laugh. When she looks at me again she has the most caring look on her face, just a sweet beaming glow that makes me feel really safe with her, and calmer.

“I don’t know if we look like each other or not,” she says, “but one thing I can tell is something’s really bothering you.”

That’s when I know we aren’t the same at all. She can see inside people, and I’ve always been totally blind on that front.

– Kevin Brennan