summary: fabrastings drabble. mirror neurons, or something to that effect. sometimes people fit, even before they know it. (trigger warning.)

an (1): i hope you're all well and happy and enjoying whatever season your lovely part of the world is in. for me it's autumn, and it's very beautiful.

an (2): references from leonard cohen's 'a thousand kisses deep' and 'seven' by becca rosenthal. listen to angus stone's 'broken brights.'

…

my mirror twin (of unholy baptisms: here are my hips)

.

running waterwards with

skin the most obvious secret we share. here are my wrists.

…

At age thirteen years, four months, and nine days old, you start running laps around the track. You continue this that day, in the fall—September, and in Ohio it is not autumn yet and later you will realise the linguistic complications of fall—running until the flesh on the inside of your thighs rubs red together and your lungs are on fire. Your stomach aches, and in your head you hear easy taunts that form beating wings—beating, beating, like your father's belt—against your spleen.

You crouch over after the end of mile three and throw up in the grass. It feels good, like you're expelling demons, and the acid burn reminds you of flaky corrosion on batteries but also of cliffs, sinking down to the sea, calm, rough and adorned with flowers that bloom for no one.

.

At age thirteen years, six months, and twenty-seven days old, you sit at a desk in Melissa's room and stare at her anatomy book, the pages open—like legs spread apart, only later—to that of the female reproductive organs.

You do not really understand them, not explicitly or even implicitly, not yet. To you it seems like a book of spells, and when you run the heels of your hands over your face, the images light up, magic and vivid and wrong, reflected on the backs of your eyelids.

.

You see the way Santana looks at Brittany, and you very much feel the way you strain on top of the weight of so many beneath you. At the top of the pyramid, however, you do not tumble or topple, although a part of you is beginning to realise that summer always leads to fall.

Winter will come after, with its dark skies which are actually brighter, and with its snow—silent and cold and special.

You still throw up at practice or just afterward everyday, and no one says anything of it.

In your mind, most days you cannot make it to spring.

.

You see the way Emily looks at Allison, although you would never say anything and Allison drives you absolutely crazy. When she's declared missing, you take up the task—along with many others—of placing MISSING posters all over Rosewood.

It's beginning to get cold now, and your fingers ache as the afternoon changes colours. Your right hand slips and you send a staple shooting directly into the top of your left hand. It sticks there and you wait for the pain to seep into your nerves, which it does. You stand there in it—in pain—for a few seconds, and here it feels like penance and like you must prove something to yourself. You don't think of how tetanus could be swooping through your veins

It starts to rain, and you tug the staple from the rice-paper of your skin, watching your blood dissolve on the world's tongue.

.

'I'm not gonna do anything you don't want to,' Puck tells you. 'If we need to stop, hey, it's cool.'

You nod. 'I'm okay.'

He kisses you. There's a steady rhythm to your pain that's striking, although it offers no repose but instead harkens back to taunts of never good enough and the lashes on your back, which are permanent scars that you won't ever let Puck see. He hurts you and the act itself—a special distinction—hurts you more but you don't say a thing; you're a Fabray, and this is nothing new.

.

'I won't ever let anything bad happen to you,' Toby tells you. 'I love you, I love you, I love you.'

You nod. 'I love you.'

He kisses you and you think you mean it when you kiss him back. You spread open your legs and your ribs contract. Things hurt but you have so much to prove and you deserve perfection and so you stay quiet and sigh and bite hard once like you know you're supposed to; you're a Hastings, and this is nothing new.

.

The summer after junior year you dye your hair pink, you want to cry the first time you see it. You think of Fight Club, though, and how, Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer, and instead of crying you take your left pointer finger and your left thumb, and you cross your arms, and you pinch the skin on the soft underside of your right bicep. Hard, over and over again.

You fall in love with your bruises more than you do with the pain that they require. You give yourself so many. They are metonymy, monsters—or blood, just you and what keeps you alive even when you'd rather not be—risen to the surface, sitting just below layers and layers of dead skin until your body reaccepts them, over and again.

.

The summer after junior year you want to start over. You can't think of how to, and you can't think of how to make things simple again—although they never were and you can't ever think of a time when one question didn't hold an answer with at least seven escape clauses—because how did your life become this closed room paradox?

You start taking showers, some notion of cleansing, though you've never been the least bit religious. Perhaps you can start over again. Perhaps you can be clean and normal and good and things will be different when the steam clears, and you wipe your hand across the mirror and take in the blurred, Lauren Bacall-lit reflection.

They are the same because there you are, hiding beneath nothing; crying seems irrelevant at this point, so you pretend the drops of water all along your skin are tears someone else has earned.

.

You can manage about a week of homework in three hours on the really bad days. You don't tell anyone this, and you also don't tell anyone that on those days you can't ever fall asleep, and you sometimes can't stop talking or fidgeting and classes are a nightmare. These days stretch into about a week, usually, and they leave you completely drained, and very, very sad. You spend days on the floor of your room, sitting and staring at the notebooks you'd filled with compulsion days earlier.

You don't tell anyone about any of this. No one asks; no one even really notices.

.

You can manage about eight hours with the same homework assignment before you have to take a break. You recognize that this is not normal, but you're brilliant and that is expected of you.

You learn everything you can and you learn it very well, and you never want to read anything but books that will assist in this; poetry is superfluous and stressful, although some part of you is very afraid of the implications hating poetry carry. They're heavy and not in the good way, and they're very, very sad.

You don't tell anyone about any of this. No one asks; no one even really notices.

.

The worst day comes senior year, in October. You happen upon an entire bottle of vicodin from when you had your wisdom teeth taken out earlier that year, and you don't necessarily want to do anything really bad but you just want everything to stop and slow down or speed up and you want to feel calm but not so sad maybe you should stop reading so much Pynchon because things aren't that hopeless you like to think but it's tempting like bruises and brown eyes and why would any God let anyone hurt this much and you get yourself a glass of water and you sit on the floor of your room and you put the little capsules into the soft palm of your hand and you think about writing a note but you're very, very tired of words and then—'Quinn?' Santana calls from downstairs.

You left the front door unlocked.

.

The worst day comes senior year, in October. You get really, really stressed about Penn and things just sort of explode, or implode, or you suppose detonate is a better word because you're just so tired of being so scared all the time, scared of dying but mostly scared of living and scared of not being good enough and not being smart enough and not being enough enough so you find the gun your mother keeps locked in her bottom desk drawer and you sit on the floor of your room and you put the rough, heavy metal into the soft palm of your hand and you think about writing a note but you're very, very tired of words and then—'Spencer?' Aria calls from downstairs.

You left the front door unlocked.

.

You go see a counselor. After Santana found you, sobbing on the floor of your room with pills in your hands, and held you and held you and held you—years later she'll cry and cry and cry and tell you how scared she was in those moments, but for now she is so strong—you see someone twice a week. You get diagnosed with borderline bipolar disorder, and you start taking medication for it, and things do start to get better.

You sleep through the night most times, your dreams ethereal and floating, and you let them fill up all of the cavities that still hurt, and maybe it's merely serotonin but they slide slick into your brain and seem to stay there, light-headed.

.

You go see a counselor. After Aria found you, sobbing on the floor of your room with a gun in your hands, and held you and held you and held you—years later she'll cry and cry and cry and tell you how scared she was in those moments, but for now she is so strong—you see someone twice a week. You get diagnosed with general anxiety disorder, and you start taking medication for it, and things do start to get better.

You're able to breathe, like millstones have been removed from your chest or pesticides purified from the air, misty and sticky, leaving yellow remnants on your skin like star dust, seeping into the lining of your nose and the cracks of your eyes, the lines of your lips, light-headed.

.

Everything seems to scatter like marbles, or like stars, and you're left there in a bed and your legs don't work and neither do your lungs, not really.

You're in denial for a very long time, and then you speed through the other stages of grief until you're at acceptance, just as, one morning, your right foot tingles, like you've been sitting criss-cross-apple-sauce for too long, and then your left.

They scatter again, pins and needles, and you can breathe.

.

Everything runs apart like tributaries, or like stars, although you do get into many schools and you do want to do good things and your heart is beating—you're struck by the linguistic implications here, beating as in physical blows, over and again to keep you alive, against the lining around your heart to cushion the blows from your bones—and your entire body tingles when you think of it.

They scatter again, pins and needles. Perhaps you can breathe.

.

You learn everything over again, and the summer sings a different song that doesn't feel at all like falling, and one day you let the sun burn your skin, sink into the scars on your back and across your ribs and underneath to rest against your collarbones and the tips of your toes, and you laugh along with the breeze.

.

You learn everything over again, and you spend the summer with your friends and you feel safe, and one day you let the sun burn your skin, smooth over the dimples in your back and the notches of your knees and sink into the jagged, ripped wings of your shoulder blades and down to the soles of your feet, and you don't make a sound.

.

The third week of school, on the fourth night, you spend hours—until morning—talking to a girl named Spencer, with warm brown eyes and a tired smile and shaky hands and a voice that seems to calm all of the little cells in your body that have been static until now.

When you tell her this, she laughs this beautiful, perfect thing and says, 'Oh, Quinn. Everything is just brain chemistry.'

You smile and say, 'And poetry, too.'

.

The third week of school, on the fourth night, you spend hours—until morning—talking to a girl named Quinn, with freckled hazel eyes and a hopeful smile and jittery fingers and a gravely voice that you could listen to, uninterrupted, forever.

You don't tell her this. But you do say, 'Are you a poet,' which is not at all a question.

She blushes and tells you, 'No,' but you know better.

'Write me a poem,' you say.

.

'Your vision broke when your fingers detonated a small trigger connected a string in your brain, something about film reels and Los Angeles, you told me that night under stars you projected onto your ceiling and traced with the palms of your hands, as if they could surrender one by one down the stairs of your spine and tell you the future,' you whisper.

'That's beautiful,' Spencer says. She's very quiet, and her hands are knotted and possibly she's trying not to cry.

'I wrote it for you,' you say, which makes you sound very young, and then Spencer turns to you like she can't believe it but like she wants to.

'Yeah?' her voice shakes like her hands.

'Yes.'

'Okay.'

'Okay.'

.

Your vision breaks when you press your fingers against Quinn's spine. There are scars there, so many that you cannot read their story and you cannot map them, you can only climb over and around and under them and say, 'You're beautiful,' and kiss her so carefully.

You give her your hips and you wonder about cliffs that meet the sea and flowers that bloom for lucky, lucky eyes and that somehow, the waves of messy desire beating—beating—against your pubic bone and against your pericardium and through your skull are silent, and that the room is exploding around you, and that maybe this is what it feels like to fit, and that perhaps low tide does not mean sound but instead different, and finally you breathe as her tears drip onto your skin, and you are very calm because this is a beginning.