You’re woven together with threads that stretch back for centuries, fingers of your forefathers tugging and tweaking the shape of you into place. This is how you know who you are, glancing down at the sweater-texture of stories criss-crossing over each other to form the outline of your body, your clammy palms seeking reassurance along carefully laid corporeal seams.
It is your parents who begin explaining to you what your stitches mean. They tuck you into bed and trace the vibrant cerise path along your torso, pointing out the matching shade of iris you all share. “Our eyes were blessed with the colour of sunrise because they’re always meant to shine,” your secondary parent says. “Anybody who dims their brightness by drawing your tears owes you an immediate apology, Olean.”
Thus, when your classmate Inour claims the front-row desk you want to sit at yourself to hold the teacher’s attention throughout the year, you cry from the disappointment of being relegated to the back. Your teacher pulls the two of you aside. In hushed tones, they teach Inour about the bookish maroon ringing your neck like a collar, a reflection of your ancestors’ famed contributions of scholarship to the national library. “Lifelong learning will be Olean’s calling,” they placate the eager Inour, whose seat will soon become yours. “It’s in their blood.”
And because it is your true purpose rather than Inour’s, when they receive the solitary invitation issued to your school to attend the renowned College of Research, you place incriminating records inside their bag. A formal procedure for academic censure is initiated within a day of discovery. The College rescinds its offer of admission; they train the best minds, not cheats and fraudsters. An updated invitation, now with your name as the subject, arrives at your school.
Such creative tactics were deployed by the earliest of your family members who set foot on this land you now call yours. Their courage against then-unfamiliar climates, their persistence in the face of primitive hostility, their unfailing commitment to document the first knowledge of the new land—this noble legacy, tattooed above your heart in the traditional cyan of their uniforms, keeps you striving through setbacks hundreds of years later.
At the peak of your career, the yellow string by your abdomen turns fluorescent, insistent. You try to ignore it—you need to publish your articles before Inour, who has still found their way into a research institution of lesser repute than yours. But the yellow pulls tight, curling the entirety of your body with pain. The doctor, echoing your tertiary parent, informs you it is time to produce the next generation who will take up the cyan mantle of your inheritance, who will enshrine your people’s preeminence into the indefinite future.
Now that you feel confined by the tales that have constructed you, you notice the state of Inour’s when you cross paths at a conference. Several of them fray at the edges. They are far less tidy than yours, rebraided in what must be self-inflicted chaos, makeshift knots littering an unstructured form. Yarns that encircled their shoulders when you were in school together, a greyed-out cerulean that paled in comparison to your royal cyan, are torn. Inour’s arms move in 360 degrees of rotation as they distribute their research findings and interact with your colleagues, unfettered.
Not one to be left behind, you position the blades of a pair of scissors deep along your festering yellow line. To sever yourself from the constraining fate your predecessors continue knitting from their graves. And you cut.
It tickles in your belly at first. You double over, unsure whether the sensation appeals to or tortures you. When you right yourself and dust off the wrinkles, you realise your many threads do not exist in parallel. No, they run into each other—intersecting, merging, bifurcating—to map out the dense network of what you are. By excising an aspect of yourself, you have introduced discontinuity into the logic your family built you with.
You run your nervous hands along the contours of your figure. Where everything lay smoothly before, loose ends snag between your knuckles. Your fingers agitate the inconsistencies, afraid to pull, yet unable to let go.
This is how Inour finds you in the bathroom. Unravelling at the seams. You expect them to mock you, to take this opportunity to impose their superiority, but their gaze instantly catches on your undoing and morphs into understanding you do not possess.
You cannot bear this, their holding awareness of you while you flounder in uncertainty. Your fingertips tighten, and you yank.
The fragment pricks against your skin, a shock to the system—your feelings no longer all-encompassing but clashing against something. There, a counter-narrative that lives in the space you free with every twist of your wrist. Tears blinked away from dull violet eyes to make room for yours, dreams of knowledge displaced to accommodate your own, a lived-in land with millennia of history diligently ignored.
Your long strand pools on the bathroom floor as you continue unspooling. The imbued colours blend together, indistinctive. Between the emerging holes of your shredded shape, something naked pokes through. You catch a glimpse of your base self for the first time—raw, throbbing, exposed.
As the last of your lore collapses, your unsupported form bleeds onto the tiles in a pink heap.
Inour stoops down to your level. They scoop up the puddle that is you. This is the first time somebody has really touched you, without an armour to provide a barrier of separation.
You slosh in their cupped grip as they get back to their feet.
They hold you in the palms of their hands.
Content Warnings: social supremacy, references to colonialism, mild body horror