The sharpness of daffodils linger, the way screams paint themselves onto the walls of a pit. Unseen pollen scrapes my soft tissues. I am not welcome here; my body knows this before my brain.

“Sit down,” she coos, with hair the same color as mine. The same battle of stacked vertebrae leaning like an acropolis built on a swamp. “I’m sorry it’s taken us this long to find each other.”

“I’m more trying to find myself, I think.” I can’t look into her eyes. The joyful malice in them is an unfamiliar cavern, my birthright.

She perches in a high back chair, crosses her legs like a relaxed arachnid with a smug possession of belonging in her own skin, like her crisp hemlines and downy fabrics.

“You don’t know yourself? That’s heart-breaking.”

I want to scream. The order to dismember myself is my only chance to fight back. With a soft plunk, my voice box falls out of my mouth, a lithe coil, a snail’s shell. I swear it sighs, starts scooting toward the door.

She doesn’t notice, or is too polite to watch as part of me pulls itself the hell out of here. The body always knows these things, and if I’d learned to listen I wouldn’t be in this bullet-free war zone. But who was there to teach me my body’s wisdom? To know which parts would cut bait and run, urging the rest of me to safety?

She wasn’t. My voice is gone and she won’t fill the silence.

My fingernails become wind chimes, sweet sounds cascading as they tinkle to the floor. They’re outta here too. Like cold honey, the edges of my fingertips pull, the prints beginning to uncoil.

Something deep inside me lurches, a doomed octopus in the cramped tank of a seafood restaurant. How far will this go? Finally, my brain accepts the sunk cost. Finding myself wasn’t the answer. 

My brain cries, “But finding a non-solution is equally as important as finding the solution.”

My body rolls its eyes.

She stands, her face feasting on the shadows. “What a pity.”

My fingernails scurry back to nestle around my shoes, to the security of the rest of me. It’s too scary to go alone.

She lifts a hand mirror, a polished old wooden handle, off the table. It looks shabby but important, like a family heirloom brought to an antique appraisal show as a joke only to find out it’s worth thousands and belonged to Marie Antoinette. She speaks without her face moving.

“Everyone should know who they really are.”

She holds the mirror between us. I wince, afraid there’s a supernatural form in my reflection, a werewolf, a pixelated melty face, a vortex of evil.

But I see none of those things. There is no mirror in the frame. All I see is me.