I turned to Constance, about to tell her that I suspected my aunt had slipped me something, and that I felt like I was in a shitty surrealist film, that I was aick and incapacitated by a pain I couldn't identify, that I hated the party, and that I really fucking hated the howling violins, wherever they were, and that the dress was heavy and itchy and suffocating, and that all I wanted was to go lie in bed and close my eyes but I was too afraid because I didn't know what was happening, and the people who were meant to love me and keep me safe I no longer felt I could trust. But the way my mother looekd back at me... I knew she already knew all of this.

And she didn't care.

Her expression was blank, still as a photograph. A beautiful void. It was the face she'd always worn on red carpets, in interviews. A face of practiced, intentional nothing.

Staring up at my mother's cold, dead expression, I understood just how alone I really was.

I'm alone, I thought, repeating it in my head like a mantra. I'm alone. I'm alone.

I shared blood with this woman beside me. Her body had made mine. And that should've held meaning, and it did. It mattered the most... and not at all. There was this attachment that I seemed unable to saw through, a bond of nature that logic failed to amputate, but she didn't seem to feel it. Nobody there felt it, not like I did.

It was abruptly, dreadfully clear to me that I was still fucking desperate for these people to see me, love me, and they couldn't. They wouldn't. They looked at me and saw something else. They loved someone else. This doppelganger I couldn't control, couldn't conquer, who stood where I stood, moved when I moved, sounded just like me.

It was obliterating. And it made me feel insane. It made me want to claw out of my skin, abandon my body. I didn't want it; it was part of them, and I didn't want any part of them if they didn't want every part of me.

It hurt too much.

Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison