June 22nd, 2023
She sometimes wondered what their parents had been thinking, naming them Mion and Shion.
Identical twins were hard enough to tell apart already, and they had been given names that seemed almost designed to be picked off, flung aside, swapped around like an ill-fitting pair of package labels. They sounded the same rolling over the tongue, and if you mumbled, it'd be impossible to tell who you were addressing.
She wondered sometimes, with an ironic sneer, if her parents had ever shunned the wrong child back when the two of them were infants, unable to tell the two babbling toddlers apart when they hadn't grown enough to properly express their personalities.
As they'd grown older, though, they'd learned how fun it was to switch places, to sweep their hair in a certain way and fix a certain kind of sisterly smile on their face, and vanish into the identity of their twin. It was a thrilling power for a child, and they'd gloried in it –too much.
They'd gloried in it until it was too late.
And then… then they could still switch, but it was tempered, and all of the fun was gone. They had to grow into new skins and make their home in something that was not theirs, that had never been theirs except in brief flashes as they held up a mask before their face.
Then, they'd had to sew that mask into place and pray that no one else saw what lay beneath.
And as the years had gone by, the mask started feeling less like a mask and more like them, like it was merely the face that they presented to the world to soften the edges that they showed to each other. It was their public selves, and everything else was the comfortable familiarity of long years of sisterhood.
She was not who she was supposed to be.
But she was.
The mask was the mask was her face was her face was the wrong face was Mion was Shion –was there even a real difference between them, truly?
If they could use each other's names like labels and swallow each other like an ouroboros, endlessly, then where did each identity end and the other begin? Had that fateful moment where the wrong one was picked for a tattoo made them bleed into each other too much, as they spent years, spent their lives pretending to be the sister that they weren't?
She didn't know.
Nor did she know how to fix it.
Nor did she know if it needed fixing, or if this was merely the way that things were always meant to be, if the two twins that were born into the Sonozaki family and named Mion and Shion were always going to be a matched set, a pair, without the ability to separate themself from themselves. Was this even a bad thing at all, or just the way that all twins were? Was it the same for other sets of twins, just to a greater or lesser degree, or had their upbringing twined them together like a pair of clinging vines?
No matter which name she owned, though, it always tasted wrong in her mouth.
9.23 AM, USA Central Time
