If I was going to do a countdown of the top three things the internet has brought mankind, it would probably go something like this: 3) The ability to communicate across geographical and political divides, wherever, whenever. 2) Cat videos. 1) @NotTildaSwinton.

First appearing on the internet in 2012, @NotTildaSwinton immediately enchanted Twitter users with such witchy, poetic strangenesses as: “Once, I calmed a lion, and he ingested me slowly and safely. I spent two months in his belly, sharing his food. I emerged with a soft mane.” Within five days, she had 30,000 followers, or Tildren, as she calls them.

Since 2015, though, NotTilda has been enveloped in an enigmatic silence, appearing only once in 2017, to utter, simply, “Yes”.

Until this week.

“My birthday is your birthday”, she shared on November 5th, before instructing followers to remove their own sternums.

Where had she been? 

What had she been doing?

Why had she returned to walk among us once more?

I turned to the only two men who could provide answers: NotTilda’s elected human mouthpieces, Eli Yudin and Carey O’Donnell. 

Yudin, now a host of the podcast What A Time To Be Alive, started the account when he was bored on his parents’ sofa after having his wisdom teeth out. Perhaps fearful of her inciting her ire, he was unwilling to reveal NotTilda’s divine secrets. “I cannot answer any of your questions because they are all formulated around the idea of linear time, which is not something Tilda exists, believes, or traffics in,” he responded to my inquisition. “Apologies!”

I had more luck with his co-conspirator O’Donnell, who, when his body is not being used as a host for NotTilda, is a writer on Heathers, the TV series based on the cult film. “I like to think she’s been molting beneath a lakebed somewhere. She needed to recharge. And the way everything has been in the last three years, some time away from the surface world was necessary,” he explained.

“Her new legs and lungs grew in and she wanted to take them for a spin on land. Once she was up above, she remembered it was her birthday (one of her birthdays), and thought, ‘Well now I have some things to say,’ and that was that.” The time, in other words, was now. 

As it turns out, the real Tilda Swinton is a fan of her cosmic twin. “She reached out to us a while back, a year after we first did it, and said some very nice things,” O’Donnell revealed. “Hopefully it shows, but we are both huge fans of hers and think she’s one of best actors of our time. It’s all out of admiration. She’s fearless.”

Now, the only question that remains is whether NotTilda will be sticking around. We can but hope. “My life is more exciting when she is possessing my meager soul,” he admits.

Revisit some of our favourite @NotTildaSwinton tweets below, and follow her earthy musings here.