The Name I Kept - By Benadee Ameesha Dias Desinghe

Written By: Benadee Ameesha Dias Desinghe

Category: Short Story

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

Benadee Ameesha Dias Desinghe presents "The Name I Kept," a compelling short story featured in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. In this narrative, the intricate bond between twins Naylia and Amilya Illangakoon is explored, delving into themes of identity, enmeshment, and the haunting echo of loss. Through this evocative tale, Desinghe invites readers to examine the delicate balance of self within shared identities.

About the Work

"The Name I Kept" explores the complexities of twin identities, focusing on the psychological and emotional aspects of being indistinguishable. The story weaves a poignant narrative of identity dissolution, posing questions about self-recognition and individuality. Through vivid imagery and a suspenseful mood, Desinghe crafts a haunting exploration of identity enmeshment and the human desire for recognition and understanding.

The Name I Kept

Original Submission by Benadee Ameesha Dias Desinghe

The Name I Kept

On the 1st of July 1994, when the summer sun shone across the world, it was the beginning of two. There were two of them, Naylia and Amilya Illangakoon. It had always been the two of them, and for the first seventeen years of their lives that had felt less like a fact and more like a weather system—something that shaped every room they walked into before either of them said a word.

Naylia and Amilya Illangakoon were born eleven minutes apart, the few minutes that would change their future. They were identical down to the same faint scar above their left eyebrow, the same crooked second toe, the same way of tilting their heads when they were confused or wanted to lie, and the same pitch in their voice. Their mother liked to tell people that even the nurses needed to tag their wrists twice, because the tags kept getting switched—a joke she told so often it had turned into something closer to a prophecy than a tale.

By the time they were seven, they had worked out that a matching face gave them a certain benefit, and they could use that to their advantage. Amilya hated swimming lessons; Naylia didn't mind them, so she went twice a few weeks while Amilya stayed home with a book, and their swimming coach never once looked twice. Naylia and Amilya used each other to their advantage and in an arrangement neither of them ever needed to negotiate out loud. It became, over the years, less a game than a language—a way of saying I will carry this for you, if you'll carry the next thing for me—and like any language spoken fluently enough, for long enough, it stopped feeling like translation at all. It was a language they were more fluent in than their native tongue.

What nobody noticed was that the two of them were not, in fact, carrying equal weight.

Amilya was the one their mother introduced first at gatherings. She got the piano lessons that stuck, the teachers who said this one has real discipline, the school prefect badge, the boy in the year above who wrote her name—not Naylia's—on the cover of his book. Naylia got the leftover version of most things; the piano lessons that fizzled, the reputation as the 'sensitive one', which was a polite family word for difficult, the sense, worn into her early and permanently, that she was a slightly blurrier copy of a sharper original. When they swapped places, it was Naylia who most often asked for it, and Amilya who most often agreed. The way an older sibling agrees to a game because it costs her nothing and means everything to the other player.

By seventeen, the swapping had become less about convenience and more about escape. Naylia wanted, quietly and then not so quietly, to know what it felt like to walk through a day as the twin people were pleased to see.

***

I used to think being her was a kind of holiday. You put on a good face, and no one expects you to explain yourself for one afternoon. I really started doing it when I was fifteen. She was supposed to read a poem at the school assembly, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. So, I sat in her place and read the poem using the voice I spent my whole childhood learning to borrow.

Nobody noticed.

That was the lesson under everything else. Nobody was ever really looking at us. They were looking at a name, and as long as the right name was there, that was all that mattered.

I don't know when I stopped being able to tell, some mornings, which one of us I woke up as.

***

It was raining the night Naylia didn't come from swimming class, the kind of rain that turns a familiar road into something the headlights can't quite keep up with. Amilya was the one who noticed first, some old instinct—perhaps twin telepathy— turned over seventeen years of sharing a room, a bed, sometimes a name—and it was Amilya who called their mother at half past eight, voice hitching, saying she should have been back an hour ago.

The car my father had lent to Naylia was found the following morning at the bottom of a bridge that connected to the main road and the path to our neighborhood that was 500 meters beyond the woods. Nose-first into the ravine, the driver's door was open; the seatbelt still fastened as though whoever had been in it had simply stepped clean out of her own body and walked into the woods. Though there was something odd. The passengers' door was also wide open, and the seatbelt—cut off. Naylia would have left practice with someone—but who?

Amilya gave the statement. She sat straight on the plastic chair at the police station; hands folded the way she'd been taught to fold them since she was small enough to need teaching, and said, "We're twins. Identical. People used to mix us up all the time."

"Not anymore?" The inspector asked.

"Not anymore." Amilya said, and something in her voice, If the inspector had been listening close enough, might have sounded less like grief and more like a question. She sat still, in that very moment, trying to answer herself and muster in her mixed emotions.

***

The search for Naylia went on for weeks, the way these things do—urgent, the thorough, then quietly, guilty, slower. Amilya walked past the road alone on weekends with a photograph in her coat pocket, stopping at the same three cafes, asking the same tired question. "Where is she?"

One evening as she was going home after giving an interview to the local newspaper of her missing sister, she stopped by the pass and watched the water of the ravine flow. She thought back to the days when the two of them had spent quietly trading names like a pair of shoes broken in by two different pairs of feet.

"Wherever did she go?" Amilya asked herself before crossing the pass and heading home.

***

Three months on, a search party found what was left of a body in the scrub below the ravine a mile away from the pass. The inspector called Amilya in himself and watched her the way police are trained to watch someone receiving news they may, in some buried way already possess.

Amilya didn't cry in the office. She asked precise, careful questions about the timeline, and afterward drove home along the coast road she and Naylia used to take as children, back when their mother would glance in the rearview mirror and ask, half a joke and half—Ameliya understood only now—a real question their mother had never been fully sure to answer either: now which one of you is which today?

At the funeral, relatives who hadn't seen the twins properly in years pressed Amilya's hands with the particular tenderness reserved for whoever is left behind, murmuring how strange it was, how unbearably strange, to bury one and still see, in the one standing before them, exactly the same face.

"You must feel like half yourself is gone." Said an aunty, meaning kindly. Amilya agreed that she did.

As she turned away to tend to the other guests, she came across Jayden; the boy in the grade above she liked. "Jayden." Amilya breathed out softly. He gave her a solemn smile. "I'm sorry for your loss, Amilya." He said somberly. "Thank you." She said before he patted her shoulder which made her heart flutter as she watched him walk away.

By the time the funeral was over, she went to her room—her room, which had for seventeen years been impossible to think of as separate from the one next door—Naylia's. A tab, left open for weeks, never closed; the little loading circle long since finished spinning: a clinical page, white background, the kind of site written for people trying to understand a diagnosis rather than people trying to get one. Dissociative Identity Disorder: Symptoms, Causes, and Risk Factors.

Amilya sat very still and read it the way you read something you already know and have simply never let yourself say out loud. 'Often develops in response to repeated role confusion or identity enmeshment in childhood.' A paragraph further down, highlighted in pale yellow of a cursor-drag, as though someone had meant to come back to it:

Individuals may experience gaps in memory corresponding to periods when another identity state was in control. These episodes are frequently not recognized by individuals, who may have no conscious awareness that a switch has occurred.

Beneath the highlighted paragraph, a second query lingered unsent in the search bar, its cursor blinking where it had been left weeks ago: Can a twin develop this...

She closed the laptop gently, like a door to a room she wasn't ready to re-enter. In the dark, she listened to the house breathe, wondering who had opened that tab—and how long ago it had really been.

***

Three months after the funeral, Amilya went to the cemetery alone, on a Sunday morning when the caretaker was the only other person on the grounds. Raking leaves off the newer rows with the patient indifference of someone paid by the hour.

The tombstone was granite, pale grey, still sharp-edged by the way new stones are before the weather gets its hands on them. NAYLIA ILLANGAKOON, it read, and beneath that the dates, eleven minutes' difference between two births reduced now to a single death.

Amilya crouched down in front of it the way you'd crouch to speak to someone seated, and for a moment she only looked, tuning something over behind her eyes that didn't quite reach her face—not grief, exactly, or not only grief. Something closer to the look of a person checking their own work.

The she smiled, just faintly, just at the corners, the way their mother used to smile right before she said something she didn't quite mean to say out loud.

"I miss you, Amilya." She said.

The word hung there a moment in the quiet, the wrong name in the right voice, and if the caretaker had been close enough to hear it, he might have thought nothing of it at all—grief does strange things to a tongue, people say the wrong name over a grave more often than anyone likes to admit. Amilya herself didn't flinch. She didn't correct it. She only crouched there a second longer, as though waiting to see whether the tombstone itself might answer, and when it didn't, she reached into her coat pocket.

The note she took out was already soft from handling, folded and unfolded so many times the creases had gone white, and corner crumbled tight where a hand had closed around it and held on. She smoothed it once against her knee, not to read it—she didn't need to read it—and tucked it beneath the flowers in the little stone vase, where the rain would get to it within the week, and no one would ever think to look.

You spent the whole story trying to tell us apart. I spent the whole story trying to remember which one I was.

She stood, brushed the grass from her knees, and walked back towards the gate without looking back—the particular, unhurried walk of someone who has said everything she came to say, and has, for once, nowhere left to be but exactly where she already is.

Somewhere behind Amilya's eyes, in the body that had only ever been Amilya's to begin with, in the only room standing, Naylia was still alive. Amilya. Dead.

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar is a prestigious platform celebrating diverse voices in poetry and storytelling. This competition invites participants worldwide to showcase their creativity and narrative artistry, fostering a global community of writers and poets.

We extend our gratitude to Benadee Ameesha Dias Desinghe for her poignant contribution, "The Name I Kept," to the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. Her exploration of identity and loss through the lives of Naylia and Amilya Illangakoon offers readers a profound reflection on the nature of self and memory.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.