by Quinn Hsu
i. a girl you see right through
she’s full of holes. you see her and you see right through her. look close enough and you’ll see how her insides work.
watch as she swallows shards of mirrors. watch as the shards shred her insides. watch as your own face reflects back from them even as she is ripped apart.
she doesn’t know how to sew, but still she stitches everything together. badly, and she knows she couldn’t fix it all. even so, sometimes she doesn’t know what she’s missing.
ii. a boy you can’t ignore
he still doesn’t know how to sew, but once he stitched himself together. badly, and he still doesn’t know what he’s missing. you can still see the holes through him, too.
look at the mirrors still embedded in his insides. look how he’s learned to live with the pain. but look: it’s his face you see now when you peer into the mirrors.
when you saw her, he was the one you saw right through. he’s been with her all this time. he was her, she was him.
iii. a truth you can’t swallow
sometimes you think about the filth filling the spaces between his ribs. the sediment of his experiences weighing him down. how he starts to feel so polluted and maybe he thinks it’s his own damn fault.
other times you think of the silt of his tears accumulating deep in his veins. nothing pure to rid his body of the grime. how he finally finds himself in the gut twisting pain of her mirrors.
but at what cost? his mind is a broken record player, scratching at his memories. what can he do to move on but change the record – yet any attempts to change the record would only be a bastardization of the truth.