I wanted to do a writing practice based on this prompt: I’ve been putting so much into revising, it felt good to rewire my brain for this. It’s not quite focused ALL on one sense, but I tried to center it around hearing/sound as much as I could. I also am trying to test out a new voice to see how it flows. The sounds of my little demons chittering to themselves in the blackness of my room at night are directly correlated with the bruised shadows under my eyes every day. I’m pretty sure the people at school just think it’s part of my ~aesthetic~ which is fine by me. Better than them thinking I’m flat out crazy, cause school is enough of a pain in the ass. But then, who’s gonna come up with the theory that Lex always looks like she was up all night because she was trying to shut out the demons who thrive on the darkness outside? ‘She.’ I did it again. I know I’m not ‘she,’ but they don’t, so my voices for them call me ‘she,’ and even though I can’t hear her, I know Helen’s slithering around my mirror thriving on the dysphoria. God, she’s such a bitch. I’ll look in the mirror tomorrow, and she’ll make sure to highlight all of the things that help the world see me as a girl. Because there’s nothing like having your reflection used against you as a weapon, showing you what the world will always see. Brenda hisses out a stuttered wheeze before her barbed feet dig deeper into my back. I hate that I know she’s laughing at me, even though I’m fairly certain demons don’t understand the concept. Or at least, if they do, they all failed stupendously at that lesson and should not have graduated demon school to stalking their very own fucked-up human. I know what’s coming, and even though I lift my hands to cover my ears, her voice sounds through my head. “What if they knew?” I don’t like the idea of that. Not even a little, but her voice is accented like what I imagine a cockroach would sound like if it were granted a voice box, all sharp angles and grating vowels. “Shut up, Brenda.” I sound stupid talking to my empty room because I’m the only one who knows it isn’t really empty. “You’d go from a loner to an all out freak.” The way she drags out ‘freak’ hurts more than her pincers in my back. My spinal cord is being tugged like a drawstring, and my vertebrae are collecting on themselves as I try to curl away from the sound. “Not all the way a girl, or all the way a boy. A bastardization of the two.” “I’m just as normal as everyone else,” I insist to the room, and the chittering continues. I know I’m normal. I know it. It’s like I have two brains. Logic brain and Brenda brain. Logic brain knows that non-binary people are real. Knows that I’m valid in my identity. Knows that there’s nothing wrong with being a ‘they’ and not a ‘she’ or a ‘he’ or a ‘s(he)’ or a ‘he/she’ or any other stupid way of enforcing a binary that isn’t real. That the punctuation barrier between the pronouns isn’t as solid as it looks typed on a page. The problem is the Brenda brain. The demon on my back whisper-hissing in my ear that I’m crazy. A freak. A bastardization of two genders. That I’ll never be accepted. I know she’s wrong. I know that I shouldn’t listen to the cheese-grater insults that she stabs through my eardrums. Brenda stutter-wheezes in my ear again, and this time it’s accompanied by the squelching ooze of Susan coming to play. I hate the suckling pops and gurgles of her tar-like tendrils winding their way up my blankets and sheets . I hate how they coil around my wrists, holding me on the bed. Covering my ears wasn’t working anyway, so no loss there, but it doesn’t mean I like the weight her sludge puts on me. Susan doesn’t need to speak for me to hear her telling me to give up. She tells me through the way she makes me tired, but not tired enough to sleep. Tired of trying to disprove Brenda. Tired of fighting with Helen in the mirror. Tired of being tired. Susan’s good at sucking my soul out of me through my skin, and the room gets darker every time she does it. Brenda’s engine-failure voice sounds once more in my ears, but I don’t fight her this time. What’s the point? “You can’t ever tell them. They’ll never understand you. Especially Finch.” Finch. I close my eyes, and it’s just as dark is when they’re open, but it feels a little safer. Finch’s voice in my head sounds so much nicer than Brenda’s. It’s higher than the other guys I know; not quite like hot chocolate—that’s too thick. It’s more like a warm tea with honey and milk. The perfect drinking temperature. I don’t quite sleep that night, but thinking about drinking in the tea of Finch’s voice lulls me into enough of a halfway place that I can reduce Brenda to nothing but clicks and snaps and white noise. I can forget that Susan is holding me to my bed and sucking my soul up through a straw. I can forget that I’ll have to face Helen weaponizing my reflection in the morning. I think maybe I can live in that space forever between half-real and half-dreaming, surrounded with the sound of everything that makes me feel safe. I can live forever in Finch’s voice.
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