I want a thousand words, not this dusty picture.

He leaned over to push a strand of hair behind her ear, looking straight into her eyes.
You look exactly like your mother.
It’s very scary

He stopped to look at the only picture she had on her table.
Is that you?
No it’s my mother
You look exactly like your mother. Except you have prettier eyes.

She squirmed uncomfortably. It was preposterous that an (apparently) self-evident facsimile could be different; “better” was plain sacrilegious. She shrugged impatiently at this obvious attempt to gain her favour, pushing him away.

The further she ran away, the eerier the resemblance became. A woman she’d never seen in her life stopped her in the driveway of the house she’d taken to taking refuge in.

“I know your mother!”
(And you look exactly like your mother)
She smiled exactly like how she was expected to smile, and backed away.

“I dreamt about you last night. I lived inside your body, and crawled in through your vagina. You didn’t seem to do much at all really. Lay around on your back the whole day. And when the day was over you’d spread your legs for me and I’d crawl into your warm insides to sleep.”
“I was so happy.”

Two weeks after she was born her mother’s body replaced her with a disease, and she was denied the diseased milk from her mother’s jaundiced breasts. So she grew without ever knowing the taste of her mother, without that comforting relic of the nine months spent on the inside. Her mother made up for this distance by never letting her go, so while the smell of her mother never left her, the smell was never actualized with a taste of her milk.

A tape rewinding endlessly, and replaying endlessly: the more she’d run away from that strangulating umbilical cord, the more she’d subconsciously crave the warmth of the womb. And her platonic-other-half would dutifully reflect this deepest craving; circling his body protectively around the foetal ball her body curled into when she slept. His mind inflamed with the desire to be part of her, to share her bloodstream and breathe through her nostrils. And the closer he drew her to himself the more he was aware of the chasm between skins: nothing but pure physical proximity can illustrate the alienating mechanisms of another.

For her this gamut of emotions was meaningless, all reducible to wanton want. She spent hours naked in front of her mirror, staring first at her reflection and then down at herself, unable to reconcile the two images. Her eyes called out to her: she was reminded of a face buried in the mud, the eyes calling out in mute horror and desperate resignation. Her water bills ran higher and higher as she stood in the shower for hours on end, trying to wash away her skin, always looking for the source of her dull eyes.