She looks at me strangely.
“What?” I ask.
She shakes her head slightly. “Nothing. I mean, it’s just that—you were there for it. When A and I talked about it, A was you. In your body. It’s stupid, really. Just a song.”
“What’s the song?”
She tells me the name of the song, and I feel the echo of a memory—that’s the only way I can describe it. I don’t actually remember talking to her about the song. But the fact that she and I talked about it once makes sense to me.
“Watch,” I say.
I go on YouTube and find the video for the song. Then I copy and paste the link into her status box. In front of it, I type: Listening to this on repeat.
“Okay,” Rhiannon says. I hit return. Then I go back to YouTube and type I miss into the search box. Among other things, I get an old Johnny Cash song, “I Still Miss Someone.” I copy the link for that, then go to the comments section under the original song, type This one, too, and add the link.
“Not very subtle,” Rhiannon tells me.
“Maybe to you. And to me. And to A. To everyone else—totally subtle.”
I hit return.
RHIANNON
It feels wrong.
It feels like I’m pleading.
It feels like I’m saying I’m unhappy with my life.
It feels like I’m saying I’m unhappy with Alexander.
It feels exposed.
It feels like I’m shouting into the wilderness.
It feels like I’m setting myself up for disappointment.
It feels like I’m setting myself up for silence.
It feels like I’m breaking a promise I never really made.
It feels desperate.
It feels like I haven’t thought it through.
It feels like I’m giving something that was ours away to the world.
It feels like I don’t have enough things that were ours to afford to give one away to the world.
It feels treacherous.
It feels like I don’t really have a choice.
Posted by M at 10:34 p.m.
I don’t think I can do this any longer. And by “this” I mean “life.” The pain is out of control—and I am not talking about the kind of pain where you can get medication to make it go away. I am talking about a pain I carry with me everywhere, a pain that has nothing to do with biology or chemistry. The pain started because of who I am. Now it is all I am. There is no way to treat it. No way to calm it down. No way to get it to stop clawing. A thousand times a day I try to think of a way to destroy myself without hurting someone else. A thousand times a day I fail. My pain is the feeling of that failure. My pain is louder to me because it is inaudible to others. I don’t expect anyone to be able to help me. The world around me does not exist. I am alone in this, and if I could find a way to die alone, I would.
A
Day 6082
I used to think nobody could see me. The body I was in was impenetrable from the outside—no one else would ever expect I was there, and therefore even when I slipped up, it would be written off as the action of the person whose life I was borrowing. No one is entirely predictable—we all have surprising bursts. I hid behind that.
I got better at hiding over time, once I figured out what was going on. As a kid, I was a poor mimic, but because kids produce surprising burst after surprising burst, nothing I did ever seemed so out of character that any parent, teacher, or friend suspected the truth. Around ten or eleven, I better understood the ways to disappear, even if I still didn’t understand why I was so different from everyone else. The past couple of years, I treated it like a test I was passing. I stopped wondering what I sounded like, because the sound of my thoughts was enough. I stopped wondering what I looked like, because whatever I looked like that day was enough. I stopped wanting people to see me, because to have them see me would be the ultimate failure of the test.
I took the roles I played to heart because I didn’t have a heart of my own. I only showed anger when I thought I was meant to show anger. I only showed affection when I felt it was my obligation to show affection. I didn’t know what most of these emotions actually felt like, because I never got to express them purely. Only sorrow appeared unfiltered, because what made me cry was often the same as what would have made anyone else cry. Joy, though, was the opposite, because my joy was always edged by the fact that it wasn’t really mine.
Only with Rhiannon did I get to be directly myself. Now, after, I fear a part of the impulse has lingered. I fear I am beginning to show through.
On Monday, my (temporary, one-day-only) best friend tells me she senses there’s something I’m not saying, something I want to say. I tell her no, I’m just a little tired, a little lost in my own mind. I don’t think she believes me, and for a second, I have the desire to tell her everything, to tell her about Rhiannon and ask her what I should do.
On Tuesday, two guys in class give me a hard time because they were expecting me to agree that America is better off with closed borders, and that most of the problems facing America today can be traced to immigration. You’re totally reversing your opinion, they tell me, disgusted. I know I should not be deviating from what he would normally say. But I can’t force myself to repeat something I know isn’t true.
On Wednesday, my (not really my) girlfriend must use the same shampoo as Rhiannon, because every time she comes close to me, it’s like a trapdoor. When she kisses me, I trick myself into being in the past, imagining it can be the present. I must put a lot into it, because when she pulls back, she says, Well, Tara, that was enthusiastic. And I tell her, I love the way you smell. She says, I don’t smell like anything. I want to say, You smell like Rhiannon. But what I say is, You smell like Rhiannon you.
On Thursday, I’m on crutches that I barely know how to use. After first period, a friend takes my backpack from me and says, You need to let me help you. I have a feeling the boy I’m in has turned down her help before. But this time, I welcome it.
When Friday comes, I wake up in the body of a girl named Whitney Jones. She gets up at 5:32 a.m. for swim practice, and I force myself to go, even though I know her performance is going to be off. It takes me about two periods in school to realize she’s one of the only black girls in class—a point brought home in third-period history, when both the teacher and other students keep looking at her when they’re talking about Selma, as if her skin color makes her an expert on something that happened decades before she was born. I would guess they don’t even realize they’re doing it—when people are thinking about a difference, their eyes will usually wander to someone they think embodies that difference. It always makes me feel strange, because I’m not nearly as used to it as the people I’m in are. I try to take the scrutiny on the surface level on which it’s intended—they’re looking at Whitney while they talk about John Lewis because their minds are thinking, Black people. But now, paranoid, I wonder if they also see me, a different kind of different one, underneath.