Let’s say you find that you are standing outside your window, eyes empty, face void of any expression, which you have done in the past more times than you care to recall, wondering if there’s any point in coming in, or in lingering, or in anything at all, the only difference being that you are also inside this time. You look into your own face, and you look back, and as you turn to flee you open the window from the inside, yell-whisper “wait!”. You freeze in your tracks, and this is where you imagine a different you would make a distinction between true you and wrong you, between the soft sweater-clad figure framed in orange light and the creature, shadow and sharp angles, crouched and trying so hard to be scary. Not you, though. You know intimately well how easy it is to be both.
“It is cold. In the forest,” you say. “I imagine you wouldn’t mind some tea. Perhaps a blanket, too? I still have the one with orange ducks, you know, the one your mom made you. Come inside. It is your home, after all.”
You tilt your head, beast turned confused puppy, inch your way towards the frame. Your fingers are too long and you seem to be dragging darkness behind you like a fish rising from murky water. You reach your hand outside and you hesitate to take it, but you do, you do.
You sit in the kitchen with two cups of tea and your duck-blanket wrapped around your shoulders. You smile at yourself. You do not return the gesture.
“I won’t hurt you,” you say. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Why?” you ask, voice rough with disuse. You shrink into your blanket in an attempt to take up as little space as possible, to hardly exist at all. “I was going to.”
“I know. I know.” You pour some more tea into your cup, let the silence rest. You have a scar on your right forearm from where you poured half a pot of boiling water and told everyone it was an accident, maybe even convinced yourself. It is currently hidden by the sweater. Lots of things are. You take a slow sip of your tea. “I just won’t hurt you anymore.”
You reach your hand out of the blanket, find the other cup, clutch into it like it’s the panacea. Your eyes are solid black and you do not open your mouth unless you have to.
You sound hurt, not in the moment, something dragged up in your memory and played on repeat despite your will. You hug yourself. You hug yourself back. You spill some of the tea on your duck blanket and it doesn't matter at all.
You live with yourself. It's something everyone does and yet it collects some glances, whispers woven into half-formed stories. You made a deal with a demon who took your twin's body. You summoned your reflection to be a helper and it went all wrong. You should have dealt with it, but you're too kind, you sentimental sob, or perhaps the unsightly creature got tangled up with your soul. Off-putting but tentatively judged to be harmless. One more strangeness in a strange land.
You sleep in the bed and sometimes under it and sometimes in the closet. You melt into shadow and you stare at lamps for too long. You are afraid of touching gentle things, but you use your claws for gardening and snipping weeds. You let out every bug you can find and whisper to the ones you found too late, still and weightless on the windowsill, words that are only between you and the bug.
You dance with yourself in the evenings, in clumsy, uncertain motions dictated by nothing but joy. You share your clothes and braid your hair. You teach yourself to cook, you read books out loud and do ridiculous voices. You venture into the forest for berries and mushrooms but you, all of you, make sure to return before dark.
You can walk through mirrors, where you are the reflection and you are the observer and the world is shadow and you are hardly anything at all. Your teeth are sharp and you dislike showing them, the way you dislike showing your scars. You know what the forest whispers and you know what the townsfolk gossip and it is not really anything new.
You have dreams in which it’s ten years ago and you would have put a knife through the throat of anything that looks like you and in the morning haze you struggle to remember what changed.
You have nightmares in which you never get to be anything more than hurt, a distorted echo of what a person is supposed to be. You hold yourself until sunlight puts everything in its place.
Sometimes you still linger by windows, looking in, forgetting it's okay to enter. Sometimes you don't fit in your body right with all of your emptiness and all of your claws and all the feelings that you were pretty sure you worked through years ago, and on those days you hold yourself tight, tell yourself about tomorrow, about the day after that, about how you can get a cat and a bird and a weird talking fish who is probably omniscient, you saw an add for one scribbled on the bottom of a rock at the edge of the forest.
And sometimes you listen to yourself, and sometimes you just nod along until the words fit together enough to make sense again. Either way you look into your face and choose to be kind again and again and again.
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