There is something wrong with you.
It starts off small, barely noticeable. Threads of something weaving amidst the aches of your body and mind. Your avatar bodies can not degrade, you couldn’t even get injured, as you learned the hard way. A reality that hardly makes a difference when the sockets on your body feel as though the rubber has aged and began to crumble. It isn’t too unlike the pains of your old life; joints, muscles and tendons alike. A dull ache spiking into sharp pin-pricks with certain movements. Phantom hairlines of deteriorating material crumbling away and grating within the sockets. You haven’t noticed it then, when it was a faint hum of a stream against a roaring waterfall.
But a stream grows into a river, slowly, and those threads become discernible against everything else. It isn't an ache, to your own surprise, yet in that same light, it’s unfamiliar – and you don’t know what to do with it. Your existence in this place was low, thrumming agony, ebbing and flowing like the crashing waves, like the tide endlessly pulling back and forth. You’d long grown accustomed to it all, even as it wears down your psyche, which you stubbornly never let crumble, even when the pain grows unbearable. So when the odd figments bubble to the surface, you start to pay attention. Mismatched hands grasp it and recoil away at the hint of softness you find in it.
It takes you a bit to muster the gall to pick it up again, mushy and revolting and strange, and you follow the unwound string. It sticks to your hands and leaves an unpleasant film where it made contact, but you persist, for a while at least …
You lost it though, you’re pretty sure. The string, not your mind, idiot, you’d be damned if you abstracted before that cheeky hare. With frustration drawing a rattle out of our antennae, you cut your losses for the time being.
You don’t find it until you settle beside your friend and she shuffles in her seat so you get a good view of her sketchbook. She’s telling you about her characters, a new idea she got while out on an adventure. You don’t understand how she stands them, but she claims that even at their worst, they do get some crumbs of inspiration for her stories. Her chatter and the scratch of pen against paper fill your ears, she shifts against and gently leans against your shoulder, unknowingly, you assume.
The coils of her body caress your arm with featherlight touches, rousing the dulled digitalised nerves. Blooming warmth and tingling sensation, it’s odd and mushy and … ah, there it was.
In your concealed horror, you stopped responding to her. You mostly hum and prompt her to go on, tiny and yet she misses it enough that she looks over to you and realise your shared proximity. Her startled apologies snap you out of your own thoughts and though you assure her she committed no crimes, you find yourself mourning the loss of contact.
You try not to think about it as you pick up where the two of you left off, chattering until the lights dim and bid you goodnight.
The door shuts behind you and you let yourself crash into your bed. The thread is wound around your mind, your chest. Not a string but a ribbon. You realise what this means.
You hope that you’re wrong.
-
The ghost of your hope sits on your shoulders as you rise. Another morning, another shuffle of your body, always mismatched, always wrong.
You learned not to judge the limbs offered to you, anything that looked like it could never hold you up surprised you, but in a disjointed way; assigning you the partial walk-cycle like you might as well not be walking yourself, but rather puppeted by this new strange body. The brief respite from the pressure grinding against your torso was the only respite. There’s no love for your own scattered pieces, they're a necessity. You can’t even say that you like any of them. Your apathy follows you like a persistent cold, infecting countless aspects of your life. The sight of your reflection is no exception.
Until she asks if she could sketch you.
You never bothered looking into the mirror when you exchanged parts, only ever seeking the absence of discomfort. Now? Now you steal glances at yourself, picturing yourself in her style, picking out pieces you think she might have fun drawing. Through her eyes you see yourself in a slightly different light, her compliments linger in your mind. She shows you her sketches, in all of the silly poses you assumed at her request or your own volition, just to draw a laugh out of her.
She jokingly calls you her muse.
The mushy feeling winds itself more tightly around your heart and you start to find little things about yourself to be more okay with. You don’t understand her artistic keen eye, you don’t think you can scrounge up a fraction of the fascination she holds, but you can find little things.
You don’t think you’re wrong, but you still hold out for that chance.
-
You might be her muse, but you don’t capture her eye.
The two of you hang out a lot. She's the only person in this forsaken place you’d call a friend without thinking too hard about it.
Her affections’ crosshairs hover over a plush face and a sewn button-eye. She tries to keep it a secret, but you can spot the scribbled out doodles at the corners of her pages and bigger pieces tucked away between the pages after being haphazardly torn out. She was shy, but not very subtle. The few times she covered up a sketch in panic, you simply turned your head away, feigning ignorance. This isn’t a new development.
Before she was your friend, she was new, scared and confused. And she was quickly taken under patchwork wings. The two became close quickly, whereas you inched closer at a sluggish pace, cautious to get too invested.
Outside of adventures, whenever you weren’t with her, she was usually with the doll. She hung on her every word, ribbons coiled gently around her arm, toying with the fraying threads and tenderly running across ripped seams. Only ever earning back the same practised smile, a huge and a laugh.
The doll always knew how to present herself, perfectly suited for the role she assigned for herself. Helpful and kind, smothering and condescending in the sweetest way possible. You know she doesn’t mean it, she isn’t malicious, long term familiarity taught you that very well. It also revealed the little things, how her smile never quite reached her eyes sometimes. Others probably didn’t notice it, maybe not even the doll herself couldn’t tell it apart, after so long forcing it. But you do.
The doll means well, you know this, you watched her guide newcomers again and again, kind where you couldn’t even be bothered to introduce yourself. Yet now you watch as that facade lured someone far too close. You can only watch as crimson ribbons affixed herself to her first friend, how she looked at her as though she hung the stars in the sky.
It’s just puppy love, you tell yourself. You observe as she looks away at the sound of her voice, how even her tragedy mask, teary as it is, lights up so brightly you have to avert your eyes.
You are fooling yourself, pushing down that tangled mess of your emotions, purposefully picking back up an antennae that gave you a headache the day before to drown out the poison nestled in your chest. This is beneath you, nor is it your place to be wracked with such motions.
It’s just puppy love.
You know this, you know this, and you should know better.
You withdraw into yourself, you raise your walls. You envelop yourself in thorns, you become such a bitch.
The rest give you space, like they’re used to this, away from your thorns and bitter attitude. He tells you you’re jealous. You only grace him with an eye roll and a middle finger. You’re worried he’s right, for once.
She’s too busy to notice how prickly you’ve become. The mere thought of her noticing it makes you ill.
She doesn’t, she doesn’t spend enough time looking anywhere that isn’t her heart’s pull to notice. You force yourself to settle, to cling back to the apathy that has accompanied you for so long. You take those ribbons of affection and unwind them from your heart, careless of the wounds left behind. You scrunch them up in your fists and hide them away, out of sight, out of mind.
Your heart remembers, of course, but this isn’t the first wound you nursed, you know how to wear it down until it’s just a distant memory, a fever dream.
She’s still your friend, of course. You still sit with her to watch her draw and ramble. You’ve never been so aware of the distance between you two. It’s for the better, you suppose.
She’s still your friend, so you trip him up when he tries to push her or throw something distasteful at her. You redirect another when her lack of laughter offends him, before it can nosedive into an argument.
Things settle to a new normal, your return to your background noise of misery, now flavoured in something else entirely. It’ll pass, you know this.
-
A new face appears, frightened and confused like everyone else that came before her, bells ringing as she struggles to gain her bearings.
She heralds several changes, none of which bear any good news. A person lost and … the passing of the title of a newcomer, ripped away from your friend and given to the jester.
She apologises, throwing her a sad smile as she follows after the newcomer. She promises she’s still there for her, but her priorities have shifted and you can hear crackling porcelain.
She still tries, reaching after those plush arms, yearning for an embrace that while given to her, here and there, has become a fleeting thing, always chasing someone else instead.
Maybe it was just puppy love, but it hurts no less.
-
You’re no good at this, yet you still knock on her door, interrupting the faint sniffling.
She says she’s okay. You’ve never heard her voice wobble this much. You both know it’s a lie, she’s a terrible liar and you know her too well. You figured she might want some company. Your tone is casual, like you haven’t been worried nearly out of your mind about her, like you didn’t drop your limbs numerous times when swapping parts out this morning.
She invites you inside after a shuffle of ribbons and paper. You give her grace by stalling in front of the door, she’s always been self conscious about her room. You always liked how it reflected her, the few times she’s allowed you in.
Porcelain rings against itself as you walk in. She’s putting on a brave face for you.
Your uneven steps take you straight to her where you kneel. Even comedy can’t hide her heartbreak. She lets you cradle her face, hands laid over hers. She leans into your touch with a quivering sigh. You gently pry her hands away from her face and pull down her mask, setting it aside carefully.
You rarely allow anyone close without exchanging biting remarks, if not blows. But you embrace her then, cradling her against your chest. Her tragedy clinks on the ornament pinned to your breast as she weeps.
Fierce tension pushes pain into your system, like bared teeth and clenched fists. You know the doll is not at fault, she meant well, she always does, but you can't help but hate her then.
Your friend sniffs, calls herself stupid and your anger grows. You want to wipe her tears away and hold her even closer, because she is your friend and you'd rather tear the world apart than let anything bring her such great sorrow again.
Angular fingers comb across her silken back in circles. Time passes and lights dim, even then you hold her, until her sobs quiet down and her breathing evens out. Her arms around you grow slack, she apologises and tries to draw away.
You don’t let her, the edge of your head laid against the top of her mask. She has nothing to be sorry for, she gave it a shot, you tell her. It’s hard trying to find a bright side when you’ve spent your whole life looking for shadows.
She bitterly asks you to look where it got her.
You’re really no good at this, but you’re there now.
The doll’s loss, you shrug, and you mean it.
It drags a laugh out of her, sad and trembling, but a laugh nonetheless. She starts to talk. About her affections, how she’s so stupid for falling for the rose tinted glasses again. She talks about how special she felt to be around her first friend, how her attention made her feel so special.
She’s become special to you too, though you lack the words to say it.
She speaks of the betrayal, the hurt, as a new face appeared and stole her away. The bitterness is there, swept away by sorrow as quickly as it comes.
She didn’t mean to hurt me, she says, she’s not a bad person, you know?
And you do. You quietly hum as she speaks more of the doll, of the distance she maintained despite her warmth and kindness. Your friend dissolves into fits of sobs again, clinging to you like a lifeline.
You don’t think she knew, you say, balancing your compassion and bluntness, like walking over a razor. She curls more tightly against you when you say it.
She knows.
That somehow hurts more.
You have nothing to offer, so you simply hold her, you aren’t sure if there even is anything that could make it better, that could make the pain go away. Other than time. You’re lucky then, because time is all you have.
You sit there on the ground, surrounded by torn out, crumpled pages.
You stay until her breaths grow deeper and her weight slumps against you. You manage to get you both to the cabinet, hardwood rough against your back. She’s comfortable, coils unwound into a sad little pile in your lap, though her arms remain firmly around you.
You can’t shed your thorns, but you can part the way to keep her closer, no matter how she decides to settle within those walls.
You dig out your old affections from their unjust grave, you let them unravel and breathe. You allow them their place in the world, even if it might lead nowhere. They settle back in the old wounds in your heart, fitting back in as though they never left.
You don’t know if you’re wrong, but you don’t know if you care anymore, either.
Your head falls against hers as sleep pulls at you too.