normality

His face is turned away from you – as it usually is, when he needs a moment to himself. He won’t look at you, will hardly ever even acknowledge that you’re there at all, just shuts himself out on the balcony and locks himself away in search of privacy. Which, sure, okay, you get it, you get it, but you think you’d like it if he could at least tell you he didn’t hate you.

Wes leans on the railings – which you know for a fact are rusting, know the paint is flaking off – and stares out at the skyline, dotted by darkened windows and jagged rooftops that mar the view of the hills in the distance. Four floors below him is the street, dimly lit by quick-fading streetlamps and the burnt-out neon signs in shop windows. It’s still not late enough that the drunks have made their way to home, there are still people and cars milling around. They circle you like sharks, catching the smell of your insecurity on the breeze and honing in, coming closer and closer and –

You drop down on the sofa.

You dig your nails into your palm and you wince, just a little, just enough that he would notice if he were to look at you, that he would gently uncurl your fists and press a soft kiss to the faint crescent indents in the soft skin of your palm. But he isn’t, and he doesn’t. Instead you lean back and tilt your head towards the cracked ceiling, leg bouncing and palm beginning to ache just a little.

“Should really fix it,” you say to yourself as you stare upwards. Do you mean the ceiling, you ask yourself? Or do you mean whatever the hell you and Wes have, or do you mean the blown bulb in the ceiling light, only one-out-of-three on the go at that point. You can’t tell. You don’t know. There’s plenty of things that you don’t know, a great deal you’ve forgotten.

Wes, you know, will soon enough fall into his usual routine for nights like this. He’ll come in after a long while of chosen isolation before grabbing an apple, brushing his teeth and pulling on his loosest sweatpants and sliding into bed beside you. He won’t touch you and you, awake, always awake, won’t touch him. You remember the rule against that. You like making him comfortable.

Staring up at the ceiling, still, you stretch out and, after one more glimpse over to where Wes is curled on the balcony, decide you may as well take the time for yourself to shower. He doesn’t look up when you get up and you still haven’t heard any movement when you shut the bathroom door behind you. The wood takes your weight as you lean against it, eyes shut, waiting for the water to heat up as you hear the rush of it hitting against the porcelain floor of the stall.

The mirror doesn’t steam up quickly, so you stare at yourself. You don’t quite know what it is, but there’s something off about your reflection, you don’t recognise it. Don’t really recognise yourself at all.

Your own routine, so unlike Wes’s, goes like this: you begin by cutting your nails. You trim them down until the beds begin to ache with the cold metal of the clippers against the warmth of your fingers. Twin blades, razor sharp, biting into and through the keratin as the crescents fall to the pockmarked porcelain of the sink. The mirror, where it hangs above, shows the back of your neck and the soft hair there where you bend over the basin, but you ignore its gaze. Why would you look up? Why would you meet your doppelgänger’s eyes  when you know you’ll see nothing but sadness and pain in her eyes, hair falling into her eyes and hiding them, hiding her.

You put the clippers down on the side of the sink. Rest them on the cloth before you clench your fists again, biting down on your lip and letting out a soft hiss as the trimmed-down nails fit into the marks already there as you weigh up the merits of punching the wall to let out even a little of your frustration versus biting down on your knuckles instead. You, of course, choose the latter.

The shower’s been left running while you were busy, filling the bathroom with steam and mist and everything else, covering the already-frosted window and the mirror and the glimpses you sometimes catch of your lookalike in them. The moment you step into the stall you shudder, water rushing over you and the warmth sinking down to your core.

It isn’t warm enough.

You turn the heat up – two degrees, three, four, higher and higher, shivering at the difference, the heat that runs in rivers down your body. The heat, now, at this point almost burns, leaving your skin with the rosy-red of winter, the dull auburn of autumn. It leaves your skin rouged and dew-spattered, a macabre rose garden all over you. The soap running down your arms towards your fingertips could well be melting snow, too, your body a winter flower garden. The water melts the frost across your mind, worry about him spiralling down the drain with the soap and your hair, skin hot and rosy red.

Your towels, as you get out, are scratchy against your now-sore skin, dripping onto the tiled floor as you pull your pyjamas on. Time for the regular routine. Time for you to do as Wes expects, to get in bed and wait for him to slide in beside you. Time to wait for normality once again.