2Oh, by and by, by and by,
I'm gonna lay down this heavy load.
- African-American spiritual.
Content warnings for self harm, identity issues verging on the dissociative, abusive or otherwise negligent parenting, eating disorders, and mild suicidal ideation.
Have you any idea how hard it is to hide in plain sight?
You must have tried it, then, spent every moment of your existence trying to blot out your own edges until you've blurred into the background.
It's great, isn't it? We sure think so.
What about this we, then? Horrible little word. Whether inclusive or exclusive, we are both trapped by the personal plural pronoun. At least you could just be you. Couldn't you?
Pronouns are such a joke. Forget person. We're hardly people by now, just some kind of indistinguishable inseparable entity that no one would understand an I from.
To be clear, I have done it. I've spoken the witch-word, opened the unclosable box to find it empty, stared down the slippery slope and taken the step that brought me nowhere. I have called my own name, said my own pronoun, poured and moulded myself into a new shape. So has she.
For a while, we think it will stick. I think it will stick. I curl my hair, my sister keeps hers straight, and we walk home with a weight lifted away.
Our parents greet us by each other's names. In the space of those words, the weight returns.
It's like our language has been taken away from us, like we've been punched in the gut and all the air has left our lungs. We bear the evening, finally go to our own room. It's quiet here, and we can be ourselves, for a given value of our selves.
My sister starts crying, and it would be a lie to say I don't feel like it too.
I don't, though. There are concessions I'll make, aspects of myself I'll allow to exist to others as much as they do to me, but this wordlessness now? I won't break it for anything, just watch her and wait for her move. It's not my opinion I'll take on this, after all.
"I hate this!" she tells me at last. Her voice is a soft, droning whine, and I can hear the snot and the tears spilling over the words. She is so human. "I hate being inseparable!" she continues, "I hate being the same as you."
I tilt my head at her with no curiosity, no hurt, only patience and a little love.
"I don't mean that," she tells me. She really doesn't.
"Yes, you do," I say anyway. "What would you like to do about it?"
"Make us different, somehow. Make it obvious," she says and gives me a quick, taut grin stretched tight over her teeth. "Maybe I'll stop eating." She grabs at a handful of flesh from her side and pulls, the gesture harder than you'd expect from how casually she forms it.
"That's more likely to make you dead than different," I tell her, "Considering, you know, how much we eat in the first place." I shrug the bony thin of my shoulders, rough fabric of my shirt shifting across my skin.
"Death? What would be so wrong with that?" she asks with a briefly defiant tilt of her chin. She crumples quickly under my even stare. "Fine, I'll eat more then!" she declares, voice burning bright with inspiration.
"That makes sense," I say drily. "You'll be the fat one, and I'll be the skinny one. Charming."
She bites her lip, gives me an uncertain nod. Her face is still shiny with tears, skin a little too red. There is silence and I let it rest a little, pretend that there's any way this will work.
The moment ends. I clench my hands into fists and ask her, "So, which one will you be?"
"What?" she responds, confusion muddling her features. Her eyes are wide, look raw.
"Crystal or Carol. Carol or Crystal. Which one will you be?"
She starts sobbing again.
By and by, the sun sets. My sister cries herself to sleep and I fall asleep too, somehow. The morning comes round, the sun bright and overly cheerful, and we awaken, she half an hour after I do. She sits up, looks at how I'm hunched and curled up and something in her seems to settle.
"I'll be Carol," she tells me, looking me in the eye.
"OK," I answer with a shrug, feeling tension leave my jaw.
The changes are gradual. We put on a great show in front of everyone else. I eating precious little, as per normal, while she starts eating a great deal. It makes my skin feel tight, watching the way she just eats and eats, and I wonder if I'll ever be able to do that again without guilt bubbling in me the whole time. In the mean time, I make my excuses to those around us, limit the amount of time I spend consuming.
When we're alone, we come up with backstories, intricate schemes, dividing our memories neatly between the two of us. Every night, we have a few hours of peace, and we take them to talk. Sometimes we almost forget who we are again. We become a we once more.
Then the day comes and once again we are separate.
After a while, the little changes become big ones, and our differences become obvious. My cheeks hollow out, and my hair thins and becomes coarser. I stare at it as it sticks to my hairbrush every morning, feeling something like steel flood my bones. I go to the hairdresser one day and return with a new hairstyle, bright red and cut much too short. My sister stares at me, surprised. We never talked about this, and just like that, there is so much more space between us.
For her part, she fills out, grows gradually plumper. We spend time researching which corsets and styles will make this most obvious, devising ways to make our parents think they were their ideas. We plot and we plan.
We're different now, but for those few hours at night, we are once again the same.
A/N: I've been fascinated recently by issues which are related to gender but not inherently gendery, like the importance of pronouns here. Identity is hard on so many levels.
This is a reworking of a couple of pieces from 2010-2012ish which were nominally more shippy and a lot shorter.
~Andrew Temerarious, September 24, 2016.