Who are you, really, when your own memories may not serve you? When the 'you' of just a year ago is a stranger to you today? When your own psyche blurs the lines between complex and insane?
Two people, three minds, and an unresolved mystery converge...
I close the notebook and set it down slowly in my lap. Then I tilt my head back and just stare at the ceiling for a while, trying to process. The darkness beyond my bedside lamp's glow swirls with mental reconstructions of passages in the journal. X's fantasies, which include a pet dragon that's almost a little too vivid to be imaginary. M's idle imaginings about crumbling suburbs and the way plants will push up through the concrete's cracks. They seem to share memories—most of them, anyway—and a mutual awareness of each other, but they couldn't be more different otherwise.
Which means there are two obviously different people writing from inside a single mind here, which, oh my god. Neither's said yet just what the other is, which means this could be anything: split personality, something psychotic, or another figment of X's vivid imagination. M questioning their own identity feels like evidence both for and against that possibility. But because neither they nor X explains, this fissure must have been going on for a while before spilling into these journals, and these journals span years. I eye the later ones. I'm only halfway through the first, and I already feel like I've run a marathon.
I lower my gaze to the notebook in my hands. Something resonates. It's not X: they feel chaotic and ephemeral, bright and vivid, but disturbingly hard to pin down. M is much more grounded. It's those cracks they spoke about. That's what's resonating with me. And because I somehow know what they mean by those, and there's one here, and I don't know what it is yet, I keep frowning until I'm certain I'll burn holes in the notebook from staring. But nothing comes.
It's after midnight. I need to sleep.
I transfer the laundry from my bed back to the table, then collapse into bed and toss and turn for hours. When I shut my eyes, visions of apocalypse linger at the edges of my vision.
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The notebooks feel more normal again in the morning. I'm sure that feeling will shatter the moment I open the blue one again, but for now it's just a notebook, sitting on my coffee table, dark and pretty and a little iridescent in the sunlight coming through my window. M called the "cracks" in reality iridescent, like fractures in broken glass. I already know I'm going to see those in blue in my mind's eye from this point onward.
I can feel the notebook's presence behind me as I go about my morning. It's Saturday. I don't have class, and I should be catching up on the homework I've let languish for the last week while the prospect of meeting with dad again got more and more distracting. Instead, I wash up because I can't let myself fall out of that routine, grab breakfast, and plunk down on the couch in my pajamas. I pick up the notebook again.
I reread M's last entry.
I don't even realize I've done it until I'm done, and a twinge of disappointment alerts me to the fact that X takes over the next section again. That's the moment it dawns on me.
That feeling from last night—it's M. They're the crack. A fracture in reality allowing glimpses of a more real reality underneath, and now suddenly I know that they mean about those cracks being addictive. I read M's journal entries with a rapt attention that sucks me in so deep, the world disappears around me, at once fascinated and horrified by what I'm reading. And then horrified again by the fact that I resonate with them more than I resonate with X, though every social instinct I've developed screams alarm when I admit that to myself.
