Chapter 4 I'm the girl in the Mirror!

This is what death feels like.

That is my first thought.

The dark had come and I had not fought it and now there is light behind my eyelids and a ceiling above me and the distant sound of something moving in a house and I think, so this is it.

This is the other side of it. The other side of life.

I keep my eyes open and I wait to feel something.

I feel the mattress beneath me.

That is the first wrong thing.

Not clouds. Not fire.

I’m not in heaven.

But not in hell either?

Just a mattress, slightly familiar in the way of something that has held your weight so many times it has learned the shape of you, springs that give in exactly the places they have always given, fabric that has been washed so many times it has gone soft in a way that new things are not soft.

Is it the middle-ground? The in-between?

Wait, I know this mattress.

My eyes fly open to meet the ceiling.

There is a crack in it. Thin as a hair, running from the light fitting to the left corner, stopping just before it reaches the wall. I used to trace it in the dark when I was seventeen and could not sleep, back and forth, back and forth, like if I followed it enough times I would find where it ended.

This crack is familiar.

The calendar on the side desk catches my eyes.

My breath comes in wrong, shallow and fast and completely insufficient, the way breathing goes when your body has understood something your mind has not caught up with yet, and I sit up slowly and the room tilts and then steadies and I look at it, really look at it, and the wrongness of it spreads through me like cold water moving through a cloth.

The yellow duvet my mother bought me when I was sixteen because I said yellow made me feel like the sun was always out.

The desk in the corner with the stack of books I never finished.

The mirror on the back of the door.

The sticky note on the windowsill in blue pen, slightly smudged the way her writing always smudged because she held the pen too tight. "Don't forget dentist, Tuesday."

My mother's handwriting.

I press both hands flat against the mattress.

Slightly rough, the familiar give of springs that have been slept on for years, completely and undeniably real.

I am not dead.

I am not dead?!

I am not dead!!

I am not on the other side of anything. Not hell, not heaven!!!

I am sitting up in the childhood bedroom I grew up in and the light coming through the curtains is pale and thin and early and somewhere beneath the floor I can hear my mother moving around the kitchen, the particular sound of her, the specific frequency of her presence in a house she has lived in for twenty years.

My mother.

My mother, who called every Sunday for eight months while I did not answer. My mother, whose voice I chose to silence because a man told me that needing her was immature and I believed him because I had been believing him for so long I had forgotten how to stop.

My mother, who is downstairs right now in a house that smells like her, making sounds that belong to an ordinary morning, completely unaware that the daughter who is sitting upstairs in her childhood bed is not the same daughter who went to sleep last night.

Wait, did I have a rebirth?

I press the back of my hand to my mouth.

I swing my legs off the bed.

They are lighter than I expect.

Not just my legs, My whole body.

This strange impossible absence of weight, the particular heaviness I had been carrying for so long that I had stopped registering it as something added and had started believing it was simply what I weighed.

No ache in my lower back. No tightness across my shoulders from months of carrying Lily on one hip while doing everything else with the other hand. No dull persistent throb in my right palm where the skillet had burned me so many times the skin had changed, had grown slightly harder, slightly less sensitive, like my body had quietly decided that particular pain was permanent and had begun to accommodate it.

All of it.

Disappeared.

I stand in the middle of my childhood bedroom and I feel the absence of everything I had been carrying and it is so disorienting, so specifically wrong in the way that only something you have been waiting for without knowing you were waiting for it can feel, that I have to put my hand on the desk to stay upright.

My hands.

I look at my hands.

Smooth like the hands of a woman who has never stood at a stove at two in the morning because someone else's hunger mattered more than her sleep. I turn them over.

Back.

Front.

Back again. Running the pad of my thumb across my right palm where the worst scar should be, that raised ridge of slightly numb skin, and there is nothing.

Just skin.

Just my own surprisingly smooth to the touch skin.

I walk to the mirror.

I do not know why I am not prepared for it. I do not know what I expected. My thirty-four year old face, maybe. The face I had been wearing the last time I was conscious, tired around the eyes and careful around the mouth, the face of a woman who had learned to manage her expressions in a house where the wrong one always cost something.

The face looking back at me is not that face.

She is young.

Eyes that are wide and open and not yet careful, not yet trained, not yet carrying the specific guardedness that ten years of loving the wrong person builds in you without noticing. Dark almond eyes that still have something in them I lost so gradually I could not have told you when it went.

I raise my hand.

She raises hers.

I press my fingers to my cheek.

She presses hers.

The glass is cold.

I am ef---ffing twenty-four years old!