Avoiding Mirrors

Cherry didn’t ask her twin brother Oscar up to visit her at university. For one, she would have to explain why they all called her Amelia, why there were no pictures on the walls and why she spoke in a voice just a little harsher than he was used to. At Uni, Cherry was Amelia, who had teeth that ripped off the tops of beer bottles, bruised elbows and a sort of sullen stomach pain she couldn’t seem to shake.

Amelia didn’t often see the morning, she woke midafternoon, the imprint of her sweater sleeve sunk into her cheek and a taste in her mouth that reminded her of days off school sick as a child. Cherry had liked the mornings, liked the early bleached sort of sun, cold and harsh, that pulled the sleep from your bones.

At university Amelia had her own bathroom which was a place in which she often fell asleep, sometimes with headphones in and the water running. She liked the indented walls, the slight smell of dove soap, textured floor that her feet stuck to if she stood in one place for too long. There was a mirror which she would stare into until she forgot where Cherry ended and Amelia began. She wanted the gap between the two girls to widen until the space between them was so large there was no bridge that could be built to reunite them again.

She started buying clothes she couldn’t afford, items she’d wear once then leave under her desk ruined from whatever she had done the night before. She’d dyed her hair, a sort of copper orange, that stained the bottom of the shower a soft peach and got under her fingernails.

I don’t even recognize you anymore, Oscar would say on the phone.

Thank God for that.

Boys liked Amelia. They liked how she laughed at their jokes, how she agreed that girls were too sensitive these days, that she was just like one of them. But she was pretty too, glossed lips, tight tops, scrubbed shaven skin, spotless and clean.

Amelia’s mum had stopped calling a long time ago.

You really want to burn all your bridges Cherry?

Dear God,

Yes.

There was a stain on the floor, just under the window, on the left side. Her bin was full, instant noodle wrappers, train tickets, university letters saying unpaid rent in nasty and obnoxious red letters. But she didn’t spend long in her room. She began to hate being alone, cultivating a group of people that were loud enough to drown her own self out, shrieking laughs, tears, chatter and white noise.

You can be anyone you want when you leave home.

Cherry used to love painting bodies without faces. The curve of a collar bone, dotted line of a spine, the bend of a throat. She had fascinated over rib cages, long fingers, veins on a tensed forearm. Who people are is not just written in their face. Oscar’s grief was written in his jaw, and the curve of his shoulders. Amelia tried to change how her body moved, how her mouth breathed, the lilt of her voice. She hated how the dimple in her left cheek always seemed to belong to Cherry, however much she tried to escape her.

But Amelia doesn’t paint anymore, and she tries not to look in the mirror.