A/N: So, eh, there was a challenge thing on the Kitten Board, but it was nine years old, so instead of posting this there, I posted it here, and it's just a Willow writes to Tara while detoxing type of thing. I took some...liberties...that may ACTUALLY haunt me enough for there to be a follow up (that pebble got in my shoe and is driving my mind batty, and a second shot may be the only way to get it out) but anyway, here's a letter.

Tara,

I'm sitting on a bench by the ice cream stand where you always get shakes with Dawn. The sun is shining on my back, bursting almost harshly through the clouds and in between the oak leaves. And of course, my hair's tickling my cheeks in the most obnoxious way, trying to cover my eyes and slip into my mouth while I sit here, writing. I took off my shoes to feel the grass, the earth, the sticks, and the little ants that don't know feet from sidewalk from dirt, but all I feel is this itch settled right between my skin and bone. It separates my flesh from my frame, making me feel ill-fitted, as though I stepped into someone else's life, someone else's body, and now some part of me is begging to get out, get free, run loose again. When I tense the muscles in my arm to lift, it takes a moment for the rest of me to follow. I walk, but my mind lags three feet behind. I sit, but a part of me is still standing, watching, waiting.

When I first started this, this process, the process of unraveling and cleaning and organizing and whacking myself repeatedly over the head with a baseball bat when habits didn't break as quickly as they needed to, I actually scratched at it. At my elbows, at the junctions between fingers, at my tummy, my back, my thighs. At my neck. Goddess my neck, it must have been as red as my hair for a few days as I tried and tried to find relief. Oddly enough, the only relief I found was in stopping. Scratching only makes the itch worse, right? But I realized I needed to stop. Stop tearing myself apart. Stop peeling flesh from bone and instead work on sewing myself back together.

Magic…it wasn't really the magic, was it. I think I'm starting to figure that out. It wasn't what made me ache, what made me surge, what made me simultaneously confident and paranoid and powerful and weak and insecure. That was all me. Magic just….amplified me. Just the way it amplified us when we first started casting. Just the way it amplifies the will of the user, the will of the source, the will of the object it's cast upon.

I started reading again. I never realized I had stopped. But the second night after I…after our room was cleaned out of herbs and stones and I just sat without…without…I actually twiddled my thumbs, you know? I remember my grandma teaching me when I was little. I'd read the phrase in a book somewhere, but nobody ever bothers to describe what that actually is, so I asked her, and she showed me. And that first night? I twiddled my thumbs. But by the second night, my thumbs were sore, however silly a thing that is. Sore thumbs. So I picked up a book. Shakespeare, as it turned out. Taming of the Shrew, from my first English class. And I just read it. It was so strange though. See, usually when I read, I read straight through, fast as a racecar. But it took me two days to finish it this time, even though I didn't stop reading it, not even to sleep. I just…sat with it, you know? Read a passage and thought about it. Considered, pondered, wondered, picked up a rhyming dictionary and then continued on.

But that wasn't what I meant to talk about. I started reading about this. This magic thing. This…it's not an addiction. I know it looks like one, and it feels like one, and it's easy to just say magic is the problem and not pay attention to anything else, but it isn't really. Some people actually compare it to an eating disorder. For some, it's really just a symptom of something else, you know? Too bad they don't have witchy shrinks, right? Then again, in Sunnydale, they'd probably literally shrink your head. That's not so good. But I've been writing, instead. Writing to you, actually. Not like this, not letters. More of a journally type thing? Or a notebook, almost. But to you, because that's what keeps me going. See, for me? This magic business? I think it's…image…type…stuff. You know? Well, of course not, I haven't explained anything, have I. But then again, you probably DO know what I mean anyway. You're you, and I'm me, and that just means you get it, doesn't it. You always saw me. I could never see myself, but you knew anyway. You loved me, not in spite of but because. Because I'm me. Just like the idea of anyone not loving you is just absolutely utterly and completely mind-boggling to me, just like I can list off a million, a trillion, an infinite number of things about you that I love, if only I had that time, but you didn't even have to list them. You just looked at me, and saw them, and showed me.

I just…I wasn't looking, was I. You showed me, and I wasn't paying attention, and because I thought I didn't deserve you, didn't deserve anyone, not Buffy or Xander or Dawn, I tried to be someone else. And I stretched my skin tight over some new frame that just didn't fit, and the less it fit the more I tried to stretch, the more I cast just to force things to be right, force things to fit, force them to be the way I thought they should. And, dare I say, now I've got stretchmarks? Now that I'm figuring it out, now that I'm trying to, not go back, but be me, I'm still all stretched out and fitting only loosely and this good old frame that I had abandoned before isn't quite right either.

I know I said I would stop casting. And for a while, I did. But I started this exercise. Just the one, once a day, same thing every time. It was in those books about this, and I wanted to try, and I think I'm right to try. It's just floating a pebble. Not even a pencil. Just a measly old pebble. I float it four inches above the palm of my hand at around seven in the morning every morning while I watch the sun come up. For those few minutes, I don't itch. And it's funny, 'cause I can feel the dirt between my toes, then, too. And the wind in my hair. Or the rain on my cheeks, when the weather thinks it's funny to drench me. But I get to watch the colors in the sky bloom, and the clouds patter across the sky, and listen to the light clicking of the needles in the pine tree in the back yard. And it just feels so…so…full. Full of life, and full of energy, and instead of being that burning power type thing I was always looking for before, it's that burning passion type thing I had with you. It's everything I love about you, and I'm seeing it in the trees, and the grass, and the squirrels, and the silly little ants that try to crawl up my skirt thinking they might find muffin crumbs or something. I'm seeing it in Buffy, and Dawn, and Xander, and even Anya, and that's horrifying. But when I look in the mirror…I think… I think maybe I'm starting to see you there, too. Just in my eyes, mostly. My face is still too gaunt, and my hair is duller than it should be, and my shoulders are sagging a bit more than they really ought to. I haven't really been eating properly. But my eyes are coming back.

I hurt you. I hurt you thinking that somehow you wouldn't notice and everything would be fine, hurt you because you were pointing out I was hurting me, and hurting you, and hurting everyone else. Hurt you, because I couldn't stand to have myself uncovered, exposed. Hurt you because I couldn't be wrong, just couldn't. I hurt you. And it was so damn stupid. And though I'll never forgive myself, never be able to, some small part of me can't regret that I did, in this bittersweet kind of way, because it means I'll never do it again. The insecurity, the self-hatred, everything in between – it isn't gone, but I can see it now. I can see it sitting there, naked and cold in the rubble that used to be a fortress hiding and protecting it, warping what I saw and what I thought out of fear. I won't let it hurt you again.

I can't take back what I did. And I'm not going to wish for it, because hello, I haven't lived in Sunnydale all my life for nothing. Wishing doesn't get you anywhere you want to go. But I will work for something new. Something better. Something…more me. Something good, because I want to be good, and I think I AM good, and somehow I just forgot. Or let myself forget. But the point is, I'm working. I'm trying. And I'm trying for me, not for you. Which isn't to say that you aren't worth trying for, but that I am worth it. That I am worth doing this for myself. That even if I can't go back, and I know I can't, I can move forward. And I will.

I love you. And loving you means loving me. And I'm getting there.

Willow