![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Oct. 11th, 2015 01:05 amShe'd cried and cried. After going outside for a while she was back by her bed, on the floor. She took off her clothing piece by piece and sat with all of them heaped on her head. Then she braved it.
It wasn't like she'd feared. She had the same feelings about herself, that the slight jagging at her hips, for her her worst flaw and the spokesperson for all the others, must be pronounced enough to jar an eye that should be being led gently on a slow swirl down and in - jar it right off her body, torque-Shanghai it instantly on whoever was beside her, who must be infinitely more pleasing even if a monster. A monster at least less maple leaf than hourglass. No, it was not that bad, and part of why she'd think of it as that bad was to get to believe that reassurance, get to reassure herself at all in a way she was sure of. But she'd always catch herself doing it and scold herself for trying to dodge, which just ended up proving there was something real to dodge, offering the damning corroboration of a very similar but distinct self of a minute past and thus renewing the moment of full frontal shock.
All that was the same, but it was as though the whole spectacle were now at the far end of a gigantic hall from her, or even out a window at that end, and the relative weight of her self-opinion among all other opinions was similarly dwarfed. Her glance now went elsewhere, even though it didn't move at all. Her thoughts now seemed the size of that room themselves, seemed no longer to be words or even words at one end, but rather what all the town's journalists might write up in unrecognizably diverse ways without any dishonesty, in as few or as many pages as each liked. Her bitter disappointment at her mayhap maple form was like a shine on one side of one thought that had many more reflections in or on it, such as deep pity for anyone clawing herself in that way, and deep doubt that the mirror-self seen was quite real. How could it be? The same brain lying it into monstrosity in mingled self-attack and self-defense also managed her eyes. The words of reproach she read from left to right, that suicide's Arabic of gnawmarks left by eighteen hour-worn underwear elastic, preexisted the flesh they branded, would have doubtless branded something less unbeautiful, thus hers was less unbeautiful, perhaps (perhaps even surely, surely?) - if that even mattered. The mirror world wasn't the real world, now, but only a niche in that real world, or just a tv set tuned to the not quite as real. This arrested her: how could it be now so small and so smudged, that 3rd person world with the her she'd dreamed often of killing? No one would ever kill a girl that small. No one, unless from pain like a smudge, would kill herself except for what she really was, for monsters in the real room, but there there are no monsters. She was not that body, there, or rather she was but that body was utterly other, while still, angle by angle and molecule by molecule, the same. She let her eyes close and it had been so long that tears and relief came both at once, like a second, cleansing, higher sort of crying. That warm dissolution of limits, that at once erosion of all cliffedge from an eye, seemed to travel back in time and smooth each of life's cutting corners from memory.
Why do we forget that we are here and not there? That ours need only be first person problems? The third is the first's only real one, she told herself. Just the one troubled cousin, but when crashing she brought any number of unfriendly friends.
She felt her blush from inside, heat reminding her her skin was still her fishbowl, in the dark. It had been so ridiculous, what had talked the spike through her head into a splinter in the thick part of her paw. A man and his worst enemy trapped in an ice cream shop uprooted and tumbled on its side and mostly buried in debris by an unexplained space alien attack, and the two had at once been like brothers, failing even to notice until much later that they'd never even thought about it. Deeper than their hatred for one another, deeper even than memory of it, was their love for whoever they had time to love, and they'd been given time. A tenth of her blush came from realizing that she hadn't been most moved by the thought of on some level loving those she loathed, but instead that those who seemed to hate her, had hurt her, had in one case said things remembering which had made her look away and shake and speak defensively to phantoms even earlier that day, had felt all along - must still feel right now - not really hate, not in their own first person places, where persons are never hated but only the crust on a person stopping our love from touching them, a crust of time and position and momentum. A crust like the thump of a second curtain-maze colliding into your own, collapsing both in castored freefall, just the second when you'd finally and barely mastered one.
She didn't know if she should believe what she found herself believing, but knew that that moment she did. The girl she thought of, thought around thinking of, who was what, fifteen at the time? Who would always be fifteen. She felt love for her, and for whoever she'd since become, but a separate love for both. Though both loves were like winds in one air in a sky-sized room, a spreading room, that was love, her love, for anyone. For even me, she said to herself up close as she leaned on the mirror, leaned in for a kiss. Kissed humid glass lips as she opened her eyes into eyes that had always been open.
It wasn't like she'd feared. She had the same feelings about herself, that the slight jagging at her hips, for her her worst flaw and the spokesperson for all the others, must be pronounced enough to jar an eye that should be being led gently on a slow swirl down and in - jar it right off her body, torque-Shanghai it instantly on whoever was beside her, who must be infinitely more pleasing even if a monster. A monster at least less maple leaf than hourglass. No, it was not that bad, and part of why she'd think of it as that bad was to get to believe that reassurance, get to reassure herself at all in a way she was sure of. But she'd always catch herself doing it and scold herself for trying to dodge, which just ended up proving there was something real to dodge, offering the damning corroboration of a very similar but distinct self of a minute past and thus renewing the moment of full frontal shock.
All that was the same, but it was as though the whole spectacle were now at the far end of a gigantic hall from her, or even out a window at that end, and the relative weight of her self-opinion among all other opinions was similarly dwarfed. Her glance now went elsewhere, even though it didn't move at all. Her thoughts now seemed the size of that room themselves, seemed no longer to be words or even words at one end, but rather what all the town's journalists might write up in unrecognizably diverse ways without any dishonesty, in as few or as many pages as each liked. Her bitter disappointment at her mayhap maple form was like a shine on one side of one thought that had many more reflections in or on it, such as deep pity for anyone clawing herself in that way, and deep doubt that the mirror-self seen was quite real. How could it be? The same brain lying it into monstrosity in mingled self-attack and self-defense also managed her eyes. The words of reproach she read from left to right, that suicide's Arabic of gnawmarks left by eighteen hour-worn underwear elastic, preexisted the flesh they branded, would have doubtless branded something less unbeautiful, thus hers was less unbeautiful, perhaps (perhaps even surely, surely?) - if that even mattered. The mirror world wasn't the real world, now, but only a niche in that real world, or just a tv set tuned to the not quite as real. This arrested her: how could it be now so small and so smudged, that 3rd person world with the her she'd dreamed often of killing? No one would ever kill a girl that small. No one, unless from pain like a smudge, would kill herself except for what she really was, for monsters in the real room, but there there are no monsters. She was not that body, there, or rather she was but that body was utterly other, while still, angle by angle and molecule by molecule, the same. She let her eyes close and it had been so long that tears and relief came both at once, like a second, cleansing, higher sort of crying. That warm dissolution of limits, that at once erosion of all cliffedge from an eye, seemed to travel back in time and smooth each of life's cutting corners from memory.
Why do we forget that we are here and not there? That ours need only be first person problems? The third is the first's only real one, she told herself. Just the one troubled cousin, but when crashing she brought any number of unfriendly friends.
She felt her blush from inside, heat reminding her her skin was still her fishbowl, in the dark. It had been so ridiculous, what had talked the spike through her head into a splinter in the thick part of her paw. A man and his worst enemy trapped in an ice cream shop uprooted and tumbled on its side and mostly buried in debris by an unexplained space alien attack, and the two had at once been like brothers, failing even to notice until much later that they'd never even thought about it. Deeper than their hatred for one another, deeper even than memory of it, was their love for whoever they had time to love, and they'd been given time. A tenth of her blush came from realizing that she hadn't been most moved by the thought of on some level loving those she loathed, but instead that those who seemed to hate her, had hurt her, had in one case said things remembering which had made her look away and shake and speak defensively to phantoms even earlier that day, had felt all along - must still feel right now - not really hate, not in their own first person places, where persons are never hated but only the crust on a person stopping our love from touching them, a crust of time and position and momentum. A crust like the thump of a second curtain-maze colliding into your own, collapsing both in castored freefall, just the second when you'd finally and barely mastered one.
She didn't know if she should believe what she found herself believing, but knew that that moment she did. The girl she thought of, thought around thinking of, who was what, fifteen at the time? Who would always be fifteen. She felt love for her, and for whoever she'd since become, but a separate love for both. Though both loves were like winds in one air in a sky-sized room, a spreading room, that was love, her love, for anyone. For even me, she said to herself up close as she leaned on the mirror, leaned in for a kiss. Kissed humid glass lips as she opened her eyes into eyes that had always been open.
