Double Life

I lead a double life.

Hercule Poirot says the streets are thick with murderers who haven't been found. My fifth grade class teacher used to believe that every postman packs a body in his bag. Sherlock Holmes has more sense. The Man With The Twisted Lip leads the kind of double life anybody might. A double life needn't mean Jekyll and Hyde. One could be Jekyll in both. Or even Hyde. But that isn't the issue.

Murderer or midwife, bigamist or bachelor, philanthropist or embezzler, saint or psychopath; it really doesn't matter who you are. All you need for a double life is a wall that divides your two selves - a wall, an abyss, an interruption - something that stops your headlong rush from one self to the other.

I lead a double life. Only, I haven't been found out yet.

There's the life I lead with my family. A skin-of-milk life. Easy and forgiving, like five o'clock sunshine. I keep this life as easy as I can, because my other life is such a difficult one. I work hard for this ease. Good brains are a boon; I wouldn't have found that ease had I been stupid. Also, a little overlap between my lives is accepted. "Absent-minded," they say forgivingly, "She's just a dreamer."

I am nothing of the sort.

My other life, the difficult one, is the real one. I have to seek this life out for myself. I must explore, adventure and gamble to enter it, and usurp all I can of it. When I'm in it, I wonder why I bothered at all. It's never comfortable entering there, never cozy. It's like blundering past furniture in the dark. Something always reaches out to bump you, to knock you in places you never guessed you had.

Sometimes I wonder if my two lives aren't superimposed. When I think of that, I imagine myself sprawled crosswise across some inter-dimensional synapse, half here, half there, awaiting Aslan's roar.