Same Same but Different

Same Same but Different

It will always be tough to lose someone. It has happened to all of us. It is one of several things in your life that you can’t get around. Therefore, it is important to remember that we all handle the grief differently. Grief and how to process it are something that Anne Hayden’s short story "Same Same but Different" deals with. Ellers fin intro

The narrator, who is also the main character (from now on TMC ), is an Irish girl from Dublin. We never get her name or age, but we know she moved to Melbourne a few months ago because she was “tired of everyone’s pity and morbid curiosity” after her twin sister Molly died. Now she is now working as a teacher. Her original hair color is brown, but after Molly’s death she cut her hair and dyed it blonde because she no longer wanted to look like Molly and neither did everybody else.

The narrator’s personality is complicated. She is struggling to accept her twin’s death and to find her own identity without “her other half”. She feels guilty of the death of her sister and to beof being happy for the separation they had this summer. She thought that if she had not returned to Ireland earlier than her sister, she had been able to save her life, but at the same time she realized that she was not responsible for it at all. TMC is also very thoughtful , she thinks a lot about Molly and the memories they made together, and seems therefore unable to have fun at on her date with Luke and because of that had to make up a lie to get away. “[…] listening to this Aussie lad bang on about how he’s really into minimal techno. I’m nodding away to the sounds of Bros and smiling to myself, he probably thinks I’m being ironic or something.”

In addition to the above TMC has a difficult time adapting to her life in Melbourne because she thinks that she is unable to make friends, and to have a relationship.

The narrator’s relationship to her twin sister was very close in spite of the fact that they were very different, but althoughtalthough TMC loved Molly very much, she felt like their relationship were kind of dominated by Molly and that makes TMC feel insignificant as seen in this quote “[…] her on lead vocals, me on backing. We’d mock fight over which of us could have Luke Goss, […] But I knew if the unlikely situation did arise, Molly would get Luke and I’d have to settle for his slightly less handsome brother Matt.” Somewhere we can also see Molly was the predominant of the two, is when TMC tells about her stammered when she was younger. When that happened Molly, although it annoyed TMC, finished her sentences and talked for both of them, this can be seen in this quote “We fought a lot that summer, I was tired of her finishing my sentences and speaking for both of us, a throwback to when I had a stammer as a child.”

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