Metro

2 lives finally complete

They can’t stop touching one another, they can’t stop looking at one another — their faces mirrors of each other’s past and future.

Cuddled on a couch in a Midtown hotel suite last night, Joy White and long-lost daughter Carlina began to bridge 23 years that were stolen from them, each telling The Post in exclusive interviews that now, at last, “I feel complete.”

“When I see my mother, I see myself,” said the vivacious 5-foot-2 Carlina, who could not tear her eyes from Joy.

“I see the smile, the lips the chin, and the legs — we all have flat knees,” she giggled.

“I’m just amazed. I feel like I’m in a dream. I see my face in both my parents. I get my eyes from my father.”

Looking around the hotel room at her dad, Carl Tyson, mom Joy and other ecstatic relatives, all the terrible years apart seemed hardly to matter.

“Talking to her doesn’t feel disconnected,” Carlina said. “They were always there, but just missing. Now I feel complete.”

Watching her grown-up baby girl, Joy burst with pride.

“I see myself, too,” she marveled. “I see my face, but with a smaller body,” sweetly hugging the daughter she had longed to hold.

“I see Carl in her eyes. I see my forehead, my eyebrows, my chin.

“She’s just like me,” Joy said, laughing.

“We like the same colors. We like our houses to be clean. We can’t go to sleep without the dishes being washed.”

The mom and daughter listened to one another’s memories of years missing so much.

Joy lost a daughter.

Carlina lost her youth.

“I was exposed to a lot of stuff at a young age,” Carlina told The Post. “I never really talked about it. There were always drugs lying around. I used to see weapons.”

Her kidnapper and fake mom — “she was an addict,” Carlina said — was often in a drug haze.

“They have this moment when they get off [the drugs] — it seems to turn them into a monster,” Carlina said. “When she woke up, I used to get out of the house.”

By 17, she said, she moved out — a young mother herself.

And it was in that time period where Carlina said she began her unwavering hunt for the piece of her life she felt must be missing — the identity that her fake mother finally confessed stealing.

“Can I get my birth certificate?” Carlina said she asked her “mom” when she was pregnant at 16. “And she said, ‘I’m going to go ahead and get it,’ but she never bothered herself to get it,” Carlina said.

Refusing to be rebuffed, Carlina rifled through her mother’s purse and found a phony certificate.

“What is going on?” she recalled wondering, and when she confronted her “mom,” “She was upset, she was like, ‘Why did you go ahead and do that? You messed everything all up.’ “I thought, ‘what the hell do you mean?’ ” adding that later that week, her mother finally fessed up to the identity lie. “She was crying on the bed, saying ‘I’m so sorry,’ ” Carlina recalled. “Your mother just left you. She was a drug addict. She probably died of AIDS.”

But the lie did not convince Carlina — she pressed her search for Joy.

“I started looking outside the box,” she said.

She found an Internet site that linked to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children — and a baby picture of Carlina that broke her heart.

“It was like looking at a picture of my daughter,” she said. “I thought, maybe this could be it.”

It was.

“I guess she thought I was never going to find out — but I did,” Carlina said.