Two Eggs, One Womb, and The Best Friend I Never Had To Choose

Most people don’t understand how fraternal twins work. A few things you should understand.

Fraternal twins are not always of the same sex.
Opposite sex twins are always fraternal.
Fraternal twins are two eggs, one uterus.
Fraternal twins are often hereditary, caused by overactive ovary disorder, where more than one egg drops at a time.

So, Shawn and I just happened to land in the same womb at the same time and decided to grow there together, side by side, on the same clock, tangled up in the same body but never actually the same person to begin with. Different DNA. Different blueprints. Two entirely separate starts that got bundled into one pregnancy by pure biological coincidence.

And maybe that’s what makes the rest of it so wild to me — that we didn’t start as one thing that split. We started as two completely different things that chose, before we even had faces, to grow up pressed against each other anyway. We would spend the next four decades being the exact opposite of each other in almost every way you can measure a person, and yet somehow remain the most alike two people I have ever known.

That’s my brother. My twin. Not my mirror — my counterpart.

If you’ve read this blog for more than five minutes, you believe I’m the loud one. The English degree, the SaaS-executive, church-on-Sunday, over-share-my-whole-life-on-the-internet one. I plan things. I color-code things. I have never once in my life gotten a tattoo I regretted because I spent four months deciding on it first. I am, by every definition that matters, white collar — down to the blazer hanging on the back of my office chair right now.

My brother is even LOUDER. He has never held a white-collar job in his life, and if you suggested he try, he’d laugh at you with his whole chest and then probably still cut your hair better than anyone else in the state of Texas. He’s creative and funny. Shawn is the embodiment of LARGER THAN LIFE.

He’s a barber. Not “cuts hair on the side” — an artist with clippers, the kind of guy whose chair has a two-week waitlist and whose clients become his best friends within one appointment. He didn’t learn it from a textbook. He’s never been what anyone would call book smart, and school about broke his spirit trying. But street smart? Read-a-room-in-four-seconds, know-exactly-what-you-need-before-you-say-it, could-talk-his-way-into-or-out-of-anything smart? Nobody I have ever met comes close.

I have watched him do this my entire life — I still don’t fully understand how it works. What I do know? It’s real.

I’ve seen him do it in airports. In waiting rooms. Once at a gas station at eleven at night, where I sat in the car watching my brother talk to a total stranger like they’d grown up on the same street, and by the time he got back in, he had the guy’s number and a plan to head to the rainbow festival in Utah with him next month. That’s not a party trick. That’s just who he is when he’s breathing.

He’s rough around the edges in all the ways I am polished, and somehow softer than almost anyone I know underneath it. Kind in a way that sneaks up on you. Fierce in a way that doesn’t.

Here’s the thing about being a twin that people who aren’t one never quite believe, no matter how many times you tell them:

When we were little, the same thought would hit us at the same exact second. This happened more times than I can count. Many of them I don’t even remember.

She swears she could count on it at least once a day. A silent routine she lived in as a mom of twins. Something would happen — the phone would ring, a car would pull into the driveway, one of us would think of something funny — and no matter which room we were in, we’d both come tearing out at the exact same moment, headed for the exact same spot, like two magnets that had been separated just long enough to build up speed. We did this most when we were too little to have coherent conversations about it. So we would babble in twin speak and go about whatever mayhem we were both thinking about before said collision.

Mom stopped trying to explain this phenomenon to people long ago. You either believe it or you don’t. Twins don’t need you to.

He was my first best friend. Before I had church friends or school friends or the friends I’d make and lose and make again over the years, I had him. We were on the same side of every fight before we knew what sides were. I could feel him in a room before I saw him. I still can.

That part never left, even when almost everything else about our lives went in opposite directions.

I’m not going to pretend this is all cartoon-collision cuteness, because it isn’t, and I promised myself a long time ago that if I was going to write about my life on the internet, I was going to do it honestly or not at all.

My brother got in trouble young. The kind of trouble that scares parents in a specific, quiet way — not the “grounded for a week” kind, the kind where you start flinching every time the phone rings. The sleepless nights my parents (and I) endured — I can’t count. He struggled with addiction for years. Not a footnote, not a phase. It was a real, ugly, patient thing that took a long time to loosen its grip on him, and it left scars on our whole family that I’m not going to pretend have all healed into pretty stories yet. Some of them haven’t. There are still a few skeletons in that closet that either I’m not ready to write about or just aren’t mine to write about, and honestly, some of them still ache.

I think what people don’t understand about loving an addict is that it isn’t one moment of crisis you brace for and then survive. It’s a low hum underneath everything else for years. It’s answering the phone a little too fast. It’s the particular kind of quiet that falls over a house when everyone’s pretending to be doing something else while actually just listening for the front door. My parents lived in that hum for a long time. So did I, even from a distance, even when I was supposed to be the one who’d gotten out clean and untouched by any of it.

But here’s the part I need you to sit with, because it’s the part I’ve never told quite like this:

When I was eighteen, away at college for the first time, I got sick. Not a cold. Not “I miss home” sick. A real, can’t-explain-it, something-is-wrong-in-my-body sick — coupled with extreme vomiting, and waking up completely disoriented on the shared bathroom floor of my dorm.

I didn’t know it yet, but at that exact time, back home, my brother had overdosed. He’d just had his stomach pumped.

When I finally got a hold of my dad, before “how are you,” before “what’s going on,” before anything else — the first words out of my mouth were, “Where’s my brother?”

I didn’t know. Nobody had told me. No one needed to tell me. I just knew.

He lived — thank God, he lived — but I came home from that college not long after. Changed schools. Rearranged my entire life plan. There were lots of reasons for that change, but most of all — I needed to be close to him. That was never a decision I debated. It is the only truth that runs through my whole life.

If you want proof twins are wired into each other on some level science hasn’t fully mapped yet, that’s my proof. Not sure how anyone could need another.

I’ve thought about that day more times than I can count in the years since, and I still don’t have language sturdy enough to hold it properly. I don’t know what to call a thing that isn’t a phone call and isn’t a premonition and isn’t a coincidence, either. I just know my body knew something my mind hadn’t been told yet. It’s not something that’s ever happened with anyone else. Just him. Only ever him.

Here’s where it turns, though. Here’s the part of the story that makes every bad part of the story, past and present, worth it.

He got sober.

Not overnight, not easily, not in some tidy movie montage — but he did it, and he’s stayed the course, and one of the biggest reasons why has a very specific date attached to it: the day my son was born.

Something in him shifted the moment he held that baby. I watched it happen. This wasn’t the uncle-who-shows-up-for-birthdays kind of love — this was a man who looked at my son and quietly decided, somewhere private inside himself, that he was going to become someone worth being looked up to. He got on the straight and narrow. He didn’t get there right away, or neat and tidy. But he got there. Most importantly — he has stayed there. Year after year, in a way that still humbles me when I think about how hard that road actually is.

He came to Houston for rehab. If I’m honest, there was no other choice. He was facing the trouble he had caused himself and rehab was the only option. After years of fighting and research, my parents finally found a place for him to land. To work towards healing.

To actually heal.

And then — because apparently the collision-in-the-hallway thing was never just childhood nostalgia, it was a permanent setting — we all followed him. My parents. Then me. All of us picked up our lives in New Mexico and planted them here, in Texas, because that’s where he was building his sober life, and none of us could imagine being anywhere he wasn’t. None of us could imagine living lives that didn’t include all of us together, all of us at the dinner table on Sunday, the Loyd family in one area code.

Think about that for a second. An entire family — parents who’d built a whole empire in one place, a daughter with her own life already taking shape — packed up and moved states because one man was fighting to get sober and none of us could stand the idea of him fighting it without us within arm’s reach. Houston isn’t just where I live. It’s the place my brother chose when he decided to save his own life, and the rest of us simply couldn’t stand the idea of not being close enough to catch him if he stumbled.

Today, he is a fierce, unapologetic protector of every single one of us — my parents, my siblings, my kids, and especially me. If you have a problem with anyone in my family, you will regret my brother ever knowing that information. That is not an exaggeration. That is a fact he has proven more than once. (I mentioned he had a run-in with husband number two, no notes.)

My kids love him, in that silent “he’s the other version of mom” way that can’t be explained to anyone who isn’t a twin. He loves them with the same ferocity he loves me with, which is to say: completely, loudly, and without conditions. He wears the Uncle role like it was made for him — because in a lot of ways, it was.

He is still not book smart, and he will be the first one to tell you that with a laugh, no shame in it whatsoever. (And he shouldn’t have any — that guy doesn’t deserve any shame after all he’s overcome.) But he is the smartest person I know in every way that actually keeps a person alive. He’s creative in ways I’ll never be — with his hands, with people, with a straight razor and a pair of clippers, turning a fifteen-minute haircut into a genuine human connection every single time. He can make a friend out of a total stranger standing in a grocery store line — I guess we both can do that. He remembers everyone’s name, their kids’ names, what’s going on in their lives, and he actually cares about the answer. That’s the gold. He actually cares.

There’s a version of “street smart” that just means someone can talk their way out of trouble, and that’s not what I mean. What I mean is that my brother understands people at a level I’ve spent my whole professional life studying in frameworks and training modules, and he just knows it. He knows when someone needs to be talked to and when they need to be left alone. He knows when a joke will land and when it’ll hurt. He knows, somehow, within minutes of meeting someone, exactly what they’re carrying. I have an English degree and a career built on reading rooms, and I still watch him do it better than I ever could, without a single class or certification behind it.

We haven’t always gotten along. Twins fight in a way other siblings can’t quite match, because you know exactly which words will land and exactly where to aim them. We’ve hurt each other. We’ve gone quiet with each other. The pain we have inflicted carries scars I can’t explain.

But none of that has ever once made a dent in the love. That’s the one thing you can’t break. Our love for each other.

He is my other half. The one who came out of the womb beside me and has spent every year since proving that we were never as opposite as we look on paper. I got the books. He got the streets. I got the plans. He got the instincts. While neither of us chose an “easy” path, Shawn’s carried more turns, more pitfalls, more trials than even mine. And both of us proved that the deepest thing we have in common is our grit. Never quit. Never surrender. Always keep growing.

He was my first best friend before either of us had a single memory of our own. He is, to this day, one of the great loves of my life — not romantic, just foundational.

Load-bearing.

The kind of love that was there before I had language for it.

The kind of love that will be there long after I’ve run out of words entirely.

There’s no true ending here. Because Shawn and I will never end until both of us are with Jesus. But here’s what I want to say now for the whole internet to see:

I love you, brother. So damn much. I know the weight you carry for loving all of us, for wanting to protect all of us, for wanting to care for all of us. I see you. I see your strength, I see your love, I see your heart. And — I hold it. Closer than you know. Closer than you think. You are a part of me. My best friend. Forever.