UPDATE: I ran into an old friend last week.

Hi all. I honestly wasn’t expecting my last post to get much attention, so thanks for the concern. I haven’t really slept properly since then.

My mom called the cops on Tuesday night like I told her to. By the time they got there, she was gone. They told my mom to stay cautious and call again if anything else happened, but she said it was pretty obvious they didn’t really believe her.

Honestly, she’s the only person in my life who fully believes me right now, and even then, she doesn’t think it’s actually my friend doing all this.

My mom grew up in North Georgia back in the eighties and keeps insisting it’s some kind of entity trying to imitate me. She’s told me vaguely similar stories before, all your typical Appalachian tall tales and legends. I don’t know if I believe that. I think it’s easier for me to accept the idea that there’s something very, very wrong with my friend than whatever that would entail.

Still, it’s nice having at least one person who isn’t treating me like a psych patient.

I haven’t really been in contact with any of my friends for the past few days. I muted most of my notifications and have been trying to avoid anything that reminds me of what happened. I’m not proud of it, but I made the mistake of checking her Instagram after my post yesterday afternoon.

The recent posts are the most obvious. Outfits that almost perfectly mirror mine, the same poses, eerily similar captions. It feels like looking at some alternate reality version of myself. The more I stared at her pictures, the more familiar everything about her started to feel. Even her face. If I looked too long, it almost became difficult to tell where some of my features ended and hers began. That part made me feel sick.

When I scrolled further back, I realized this had been happening for much longer than I thought.

At first it was subtle. The earliest post I can confidently pin it to is from August of 2022, a couple months after we graduated high school. She was at the same restaurant I’d posted from a few weeks earlier. After that, it started escalating slowly. Similar hairstyles. Similar clothes. Eventually she started doing her eyeliner the way I do mine. Dark brown instead of black, blended slightly under the eye towards the outer corner. It honestly doesn’t suit her eye shape very well.

The only difference is that there are almost never other people in her posts.

I’ll find a picture from one of my nights out with friends, then find her version a week or two later in almost the same exact outfit and pose. Except she’s completely alone. Some of them are obviously taken with timers. The more candid ones were probably taken by her boyfriend. Other than him, I’m not really sure she has anybody.

I started noticing something worse. Something that made me wish I had never looked at all.

Sometimes she posts first.

A picture at the botanical garden. Another one down by the river. Both almost identical to mine: same framing, same outfit, same pose. The only difference is that hers were uploaded almost a week before mine.

I actually had to stop and check the timestamps multiple times because I was so sure I was remembering it wrong.

I closed the app and opened my notifications. They’d been piling up for days now. Between stacks of Amazon sales and bank statements, I started noticing strange texts from friends.

Daniella had asked if I was okay because apparently I’d texted her at three in the morning asking her strange questions about identity. I asked her what she meant and she sent me screenshots. Most of the messages had been unsent, but one of them was still there.

“when do u think someone stops being themself”

Sydney had texted me asking why I kept unsending messages on Snapchat. I answered her.

She replied quickly. Apparently, “I” had been texting her on Snapchat earlier that morning asking weirdly specific questions about the way I was in high school. If she remembered what shampoo I had used, or whether I still smoked American Spirit blacks. If I still wore the same perfume.

She told me when she answered, the messages disappeared almost immediately.

I turned my phone off. I had a shift in the morning and I didn’t want to work myself up over this. I was scared, obviously, but I was still kind of hoping maybe this would all blow over and she would fade into the background again.

When I went to work this morning, I tried to put it all out of my mind. There were more customers today and less quiet moments for the dread to creep up on me. Until my first smoke break, at least.

One of my coworkers came up to me while I was heading outside to light up. She said I’d followed her from a second Instagram account sometime last month, she’d been meaning to bring it up to me but kept forgetting.

The account had my name spelled slightly differently. There were only a few posts, all blurry pictures of places I recognized immediately. My apartment complex from outside at night. The Dunkin’ we used to go to when we skipped classes. The park by her parents’ house.

My coworker told me she blocked and reported it because the account kept watching every single story she posted within seconds. She said it didn’t feel like me.

I thanked her and took my break.

I sat down on the curb and lit up a cigarette. I kept fidgeting with the pack. American Spirit blacks. When I started smoking in high school, I had always bought the blue pack. She was still stealing cigarettes from her older brothers. They only smoked blacks. I switched in sophomore year because the blacks tasted more like her.

I always thought it had been the other way around.

I started thinking about other things now. The hot pink GRRRL-POWER! shirt I had begged my mom to buy me in third grade after I saw her wearing it. Her little phrases I picked up here and there. I started wearing glittery eyeshadow on my inner corners around the end of high school because I liked how it looked on her.

Had I been the one to pierce my nose first, or had she? I know I said it had been me in my last post, but I genuinely can’t remember anymore.

I think maybe I liked matching with her too.