 After 29 years stuck together the twins were willing to accept the risks of surgery for the chance of separate lives. CNN headline July 8th. The two women couldn't have been more different even if they were attached like the stem of a plant that grows two distinct flowers. No, they were more like double hip cherries, two pits with the fleshy mass joining them at the center. Lale, whose name means Tulip and Laudan, whose name means Nestersham, were destined from the start. Arriving in the world as one they leaned into each other at the skull, thought a thousand different thoughts but shared one clear vision to be able to run without the other, to know silence when the other wished for chatter, to look at each other face to face without a mirror. They hauled themselves under a wide chador to law school to fight the police adorn themselves with red lipstick. Across the land their celebrity afforded them a kind of protection. Each dreamed of a separate greatness. Laudan with a twinkle in her eye, the smaller face dreamed of being a lawyer. She wanted to change the way women were seen in her country. Lale with the upturned eyebrow and slightly crooked smile went along with law school but dreamed of becoming a journalist. Maybe right about her sister's fight for justice. She imagined herself a poet too. After so much togetherness, hearing her sister's breath every night was impossible not to think of the pleasure of distance. When they heard of the Nepalese twins disjoined at one they decided to risk it all. At 29 they saw separation as the ultimate freedom. No matter the risks they told the doctors, we don't want to wake up as one. For 50 hours the team of surgeons sawed and chipped at the hardened skull between them, the column of connection. They sorted through blue veins buried in tissue and flesh with tiny instruments that would reroute blood like transit maps. Laudan and Lale might travel different roads than the one that led them to this longing. But the doctors could not save them. We managed to open the sister's skull safely, Dr. Liu Chun Yang said, but with the opening of skulls came the shock of a hidden vein, a nexus they could not detect in all the medical calculations. Finally separate the two women lay together on the operating table like the two flowers of their names, Longing to Bloom.