Shedding

This skin is not mine.

I stand before a mirror and a stranger stares back from the other side. He has been there my whole life, always staring out from mirrors, glass, water, anything reflective will have this fake visage in it. This Not Me. The eternal impostor. I lift my hand, he lifts his. I cock my head, he copies. Everything that I do, he mimics. We look alike, but I’m not him. I know I’m not him. Looking at him fills me with disgust. With hatred. He’s a virus; implanted in my brain, hiding the truth from my eyes. I look down (he does the same), staring at my hands, my body, how it looks fuzzy, wrong, like I’ve been poorly rotoscoped into reality – this false form hiding my true self.

I bring a hand to my face, the impostor copying. We feel our face, the rough skin of our chin, shaved raw, running fingers down our neck, grazing our Adam’s Apple, over our chest, our stomachs, our hips. All of it wrong, somehow. I dig my fingers into the false flesh of my hips, feeling the sparks of pain as my nails slice into the skin. I push deeper, nerves burning as blood begins to trickle down my thighs. My fingertips slide into the new holes in my being, feeling the warmth under the skin, the stench of blood rising to my nostrils.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

The voice startles me, my fingers evacuating the bloody orifices and flicking crimson onto the mirror. The impostor stares, hands still at his hips, eyes wide with fear. No blood stains his flesh, no tears in the skin.

He isn’t copying me.

I can be free.

My hands return to my hips, diving back under the skin. I hook my fingers and rip, tear, pull myself apart at the seams. Crimson splatters to the ground as I peel myself upwards, tearing apart the lie of my torso – exposing the sinew and muscle beneath, the thin membrane of my truth keeping my innards together. The false flesh hangs in tatters from my body, drenched in gore, as the reflected impostor stares at me in horror.

“Stop! Just fucking stop!” He pleads, still frozen with his hands at his hips, face a mask of terror, “Why can’t you just stay like this? It’s so much safer for you this way!”

I scream and spit and curse and hiss and rip and tear and split and get it off please just get it off I can’t do this anymore I can’t I’ll die if I stay like this just let me live please please please please you’re a lie a fake a shield armour.

I don’t need you anymore.

I continue to tear myself open, peeling away the skin of my shoulders, freeing my arms from their sleeves of flesh, letting the assortment of dead meat slump to the floor with wet thunks. My fingers push into the fold beneath my neck, ripping up and over, pulling his face away from my skull. I feel my back part, the flesh giving up its hold on me. It slides off me as static fills my ears. My nerves burn, exposed to the air. I look down, seeing my legs slowly peel free from the flesh that kept me trapped.

My eyes return to the mirror. He’s gone; all that remains is a pile of meat on the floor, surrounded by a lake of dark crimson blood.

I see myself; incomplete, but it’s me, not the impostor. For the first time, I can see myself.

My shedding is complete. The skin shall regrow, but this time it will be different. I will be free.

This time, the skin will be mine.