HOW IS MY MAMI RIGHT HERE, AND ALSO OVER THERE.

It's 7pm in Iloilo, which means it's 7am in Maryland, which means my sister is on the couch with a bottle and a baby and a face that is, unmistakably, my face.

"What are you having for breakfast?" I ask.

"What did you have for dinner?" she asks.

We say it at the same time. Same words, almost. Same rising note at the end.

We stop. We look at each other, and we both say "ha?" with the exact same open-mouthed smile, the exact same eyebrows, like we rehearsed it. We didn't rehearse it. We never rehearse it. It just happens, every time, the way a sneeze happens.

Then we both try again. Then we both stop again. Then we laugh, because of course we do, because this is maybe the four-hundredth time this exact thing has happened and it is still, somehow, funny.

My niece, almost six months old now, looks up from the bottle. She looks at the screen. She looks at her mom. Back at the screen. I wonder, sometimes, what that's like for her — to look up and find two of the same face, one of them holding her, one of them very far away, both of them laughing at nothing she can understand yet.

How is my mami right here, I imagine her thinking, and also over there?

It's a question I've been asked my whole life, in different words. People mean it kindly. What's it like, having a twin? I have never known how to answer it. I still don't, really. But I think it might look something like this — two people, an ocean and twelve hours apart, asking the same question at the same time, and then laughing because neither of us is surprised.

Most of our jokes are older than we are willing to admit. Most of them are also, technically, our dad's.

When we want to point out that a situation is wrong — genuinely wrong, or just mildly annoying, or simply Not It — we say "ees no rye, mang." It's not right, man. Said in the voice our dad uses when he's poking fun at something, mock-offended, like he can't believe what he's just witnessed. Neither of us remembers him teaching it to us. We just absorbed it, the way you absorb a smell from a house you grew up in, and now it comes out of both of our mouths in the exact same cadence, like a phrase we inherited instead of learned.

If someone makes a dumb choice — not an honest mistake, but the kind where you can tell they knew better and did it anyway — that person is dumb dumb. Not dumb. Dumb dumb. The repetition is the point. It's how you say someone really should have known.

And sometimes, mid-sentence, in our normal voices, a word will slip into the accent that makes our Filipino side come out. This becomes dis. That becomes dat. What do you becomes whatchu. We don't plan it. We don't explain it. We just understand it, every time, instantly, the way you understand a word in your first language before you've finished hearing it.

I've never had to translate any of this for my sister. Not once, in over two decades. I don't think I could even if I tried — "ees no rye, mang" doesn't mean anything, technically. It only means something because we both heard it the same way, at the same time, from the same people, our whole lives.

Sometimes one of us will say something, and the other one will go quiet for half a second — not confused, just recalibrating — because that was the exact sentence sitting in her mouth, about to come out.

We have a line for this too. It's borrowed, not inherited — something from a reel that went around a while back, two women talking, deadpan, over drinks. We don't say it the way the original did. We say it our way: calm, a little smug, like we're barely impressed by our own telepathy. "I was gonna say the same thing."

It's become its own kind of currency. We collect these moments without trying to. A joke lands, a reference slides in, a sentence finishes itself in stereo — and it happens so often that an entire conversation between us, in our actual unfiltered voices, with no bit, no character, no callback, would almost feel like something was missing. Like static where a song should be.

People ask what it's like having a twin the way they'd ask what it's like to have a sister, or a hometown, or a left hand — like it's a fact about me they're curious about, a feature. And for years I gave them feature-shaped answers. We're close. We're similar. We finish each other's sentences, haha.

All of that is true. None of it is the answer.

Here's what I think it actually is: it's having a person who is not you, who has her own day, her own thoughts, her own face doing its own thing on the other side of the world — and somehow, without either of us trying, she arrives at the exact place I'm standing. Not because she's me. Because she isn't, and she still gets there anyway.

That's the part that doesn't fit in a sentence. A mirror only shows you yourself — your face, reversed, doing exactly what you're doing, at the exact moment you're doing it, because it has no choice. My sister has every choice. She could be thinking about anything. She could be saying anything. And then she says the thing I was about to say, in the voice we both got from the same place, and laughs the way only someone who has heard that joke for twenty years would laugh — and none of it was required of her. She just happened to be there too.

I think that's the closest I've ever gotten to an answer. Having a twin isn't like having a reflection. It's like discovering, again and again, for your entire life, that you were never as alone in your own head as you thought — that someone else has been in there too, on her own time, by her own will, and keeps showing up anyway.

Tonight it's 7pm again, and the call connects, and there she is — couch, bottle, baby, my face looking back at me from somewhere twelve hours and an ocean away.

"What are you having for —" we both start.

We stop. We say "ha?" at the same time, same smile, same eyebrows. We laugh. Someone gestures for the other to go first.

My niece looks up from the bottle. Screen, then mom, then screen again. She's almost six months old, and she doesn't have a word yet for any of this — for time zones, for twins, for the strange math of one face existing in two places. She just knows what she sees: two women who look like her mami, laughing at the same moment, for reasons she can't follow yet.

Someday someone will ask her what it's like, having an aunt who looks just like her mom. She won't have an answer either. But she'll have this — has had this, actually, almost every evening of her life so far — two faces on a screen, doing the same thing without planning to, both of them certain the other one understands.

That's the part I'd want her to keep, if she keeps anything. Not the explanation. Just the image. Two people, far apart, arriving at the same place anyway.