Sometimes I forget that I’m not someone else. Sometimes I forget that the person I shaped myself into for her wasn’t who I became: smiling and sitting knee-to-knee at the edge of our friend’s party, the sour beer on her breath and how I tried my best to sit very straight, elongating my neck like the actresses I saw in magazines. She didn’t notice, I don’t think, and this was the beginning of some strange lifelong habit: knotting myself like a cherry stem on an extended tongue for the amusement of those around me, patterning myself after inimical people.
Their names are still foreign and clumsy in my mouth. I can’t speak them aloud. I know that if I wanted to, I could find them now like I was found. Unravel their lives slowly, worrying the threads until they came apart entirely in my hands. I can’t imagine them as having families, friendships, children; their voices have vanished entirely. And if I don’t know the sound of someone’s voice they somehow cease to be real.
They never existed, and what they did to me never happened - this is the unreality I live, balanced constantly on the edge of fear, that he or she will leave me as they did. It wasn’t the shame but the abandonment that ate me alive. Sometimes I worry that I dreamed those days, throwing looks backward as I walked down the street, so certain that they’d found me in an impossible place. But everything about them was so well-orchestrated, so breathtakingly engineered; they could have mapped me out with blind hands, and discovered me in the dark.
Now I know not to trust implicitly and I do it regardless - throwing my griefs at the feet of whoever will listen. These are trauma bonds, regret in every inflection, as if telling these strangers the things I’ve done will make my sins disappear. And still all I know about the people surrounding me on the street is that they will never be her.
At night sometimes I like to drive, especially just before the rain; the light seems to hold itself in just a certain way. After midnight I can coax myself to calmness, remind myself that just because they didn’t love me doesn’t mean that they didn’t love a part of me - and maybe that will have to be enough. I retrace the same black miles in my car again and again, hold conversations in my head with people I’ve never met and am too afraid to. By this time they are all at the end of a long list: girls with brown hair and brown eyes, men evasive and quiet, half a dozen different people who I feel I could rescue if I just found the right things to say.
This is the house I’ve returned to. This isn’t a home but a final resting place. Dirty handprints streaked on the walls, cats under the floorboards and a sink filled with muddy water. The ghosts here don’t sleep. Here I plan to will myself into nothingness; when the hunger caves in my stomach I close my eyes and imagine the skin sloughing off my bones. Here I can pretend I’m someone else.
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if my pulse doubled beneath your hand. In this house the arrow-winged birds nest in the eaves and slices of sunlight cut through the dusted blinds. You can’t see me - you wouldn’t care to see me - but I can see you. Ragged dark hair and quiet eyes, your heart in your throat. I have memorized your patterns, the willfulness like an animal’s. The skim of your hair down your neck and the wings of your shoulder blades, narrow silhouette and the wide cheekbones like a cat’s.
I used to think that she and I shared the same lungs, that if you split us open we would each breathe for the other. Your shadow is long and it scythes the light like a blade. You are a stranger in this house, too. At night the floorboards creak and something moves in the attic; the darkness chases the sleep from my eyes. This is all indulgently melodramatic, though, and I loathe it. For so long this place stood empty until I came to fill it, but it feels no more lived-in now that I’m here. I wash my hands in the sink but they never come clean, and though I speak to the memory of you it never speaks back.