It's Cold Upstairs | ✔

(14) Upstairs

New notebook. The cover drew me; it's got a pattern like those iridescent chills, like the first notebook I found in that drawer two weeks ago. Maybe M found it for me. I did feel something in the bookstore that day, tugging me towards the back where I found the notebook shelf. When that happens to me, it usually means something.

Either way, it got me thinking about a lot of things. Just standing there in the bookstore, holding a notebook and staring at it like a weirdo. I kind of like watching the looks people give me when I do that now. Because there may be no such thing as normal, but anyone who says I blend in with the general population is lying, and knows it. When your options in the face of that are tears or amusement, sometimes all you can do is laugh. 

Anyway, I found this notebook, and it just... I felt something. I couldn't really tell you what it is yet, but maybe in the future I'll be able to. Putting names to emotions is still one of those long-term, ongoing skills I've been working at, and will be for a while.

Or maybe this feeling's just particularly indescribable. Who knows.

Anyway, I've decided to start journaling. Again.

I don't know who I am anymore. I've said that so many times to myself, but there's something different about writing it down, and I almost came to an answer while thinking about it today? An answer that's not really an answer, but it's the closest I've gotten so far. X's strategy worked. Maybe a little too well. They studied and changed and became a new person, and that person is me. X was lost in the process, just like M was scared of. But there are still... pieces left behind. Probably the things that M was holding onto, that they said would come back to haunt X. But I'm not haunted. Not by this, anyway. Only X was so scared of their earlier self.

I want to find it again.

I've been gathering those pieces whenever I find them. Bits of emotion. Snippets of memory. I talked to dad and found a couple more early writings of mine: songs and codes. Either M's, or from the person we were before the first split back in elementary school. I've been gathering all of M's poems into a different notebook, just to have them all in one place. They were good at capturing those iridescent cracks. That's probably why they turned to poetry in the first place: it's good at putting feelings into words in a way that words themselves can't quite manage. Pictures, either, though some of M's certainly succeeded. I've tried my hand at that recently. I'm better at it than I thought I was.

I haven't tried poetry myself yet. That still feels too close to home. But I'll get there.

I've also got a new bracelet now. Not to tie anything together this time. Just to remember.

That whole wanting-to-keep-my-past-self thing is why I wanted to start journaling again. Or just to start journaling. I can't really say "again" when it wasn't me the first time. Ugh. It's weird. Maybe I need my own codes, for X and M and all their different stages. For who they—I—were before. For all the people I've cycled through since, always growing, always changing. I'm a social person now. I'm the one who talks to classmates, teachers, strangers on the street. Only half of them look at me funny. I even pretend to make new friends.

I never did find out how to make friends. I stumble across people I can talk to by accident on occasion, and try to hold onto them when I do. But I've never been able to replicate that process when I try. Maybe I'm the kind of person who just doesn't make friends easily. Or who just doesn't make friends.

I pretend it doesn't bother me. 

Sometimes that's all you can do. 

***

I know now what X and M once talked about, about my... about our mind being like a house. Upstairs and downstairs. I mostly live on the ground floor. It's warm down there. Familiar. It's the house I've built for myself, furnished and upgraded, and it's always changing. New paint, new furniture, new accents on the walls. Sometimes I come home and find that even the framing has changed without my noticing, and I can't remember when. I want these journals as a log for future changes, so I can at least read back and try to identify who I once was. Reconcile with the house's earlier forms as I continue to improve it and it continues to improve itself, always a little better than it was before.

But there's another part of the house that doesn't change.

Sometimes I linger for hours, even days, upstairs. In M's old rooms. There's something here that feels more like home, in a way, than the constantly shifting rooms one floor down. I come up here to read M's old journal entries. To search anywhere I can for those iridescent cracks and the chills they bring, but I'm not looking for the chills. Not really. I'm looking for the part of me that loves them, craves them, cries when I see them, sometimes... so that maybe one day, I can ask it why.

It's hard to say why M's old rooms call to me the way they do. Maybe because they're the only part of the house that doesn't change. Maybe because that makes me feel more grounded, somehow, than all my reading and journaling and existing put together. Like there's a hole in me somewhere that will never heal, but that this place at least patches a little. Maybe because even though there's no one living here, these rooms don't feel empty. Like M's still here, in some form, somewhere.

Maybe M was right, and someone who doesn't know themself will keep circling back to the core of their being, again and again, never really able to move forward. Maybe M was all X knew, so when they set out to become someone different, they ended back at who they've always been. And maybe that's me.

It's cold upstairs. But I don't leave. 

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