Happy Birthday

I grew up with an uncanny resemblance to my sister, Koseli. In order to distinguish my individual personality in seventh grade, I dyed my hair with henna. The result yielded hair roughly the color of beet juice. For different and otherwise unknown reasons, Koseli was doing similar-- if less dramatic-- things to her own hair, and so we really weren't ever that different at all. We were the orange-hair twins, the Henna sisters; our faces were round, and our teeth full of braces. We were practically interchangeable until I hit a growth spurt and sprouted six inches in less than a year. Stand us in a police line-up and a witness could easily tell us apart-- I'm the huge one, she's the tiny one. Take photos of our faces and recordings of our voices, however, and anyone would be hard-pressed to discriminate. When talking to her on the phone, I often mistake echoes of my own voice for hers and demand to know why she's mocking me. In also talking to her on the phone, I mistake her real voice for an echo and yell loudly into the receiver, "Hello? Hello?" to which she responds in a similar fashion and we're both equally confused.
"Am I you, or are you me?"
I'm not her identical twin exactly, just her identical twin delayed by three, solid years. If I need to look into my future, I need only gaze as far as Koseli has been, and I can, mistily, see myself in the distance.
Despite all these similarities, we're more different than anyone can see from old family photos. She is the next Sharon Creech, Martha Stewart, Editor-in-Chief, and whatever else in the world she wants to be because she is KOSELI--the one-and-only-- and there is no one else in the world like her.
Except me.
Happy birthday to my intelligent, beautiful, and always sweet older sister.