When you wake up, you spend a long while just staring into the mirror.
You feel like there’s someone standing right behind your reflection, but you can’t see anything. You’re always in the way.
She comes in and finds you staring again. She grabs your shoulder, steps in front of you, tells you to brush your teeth and come eat breakfast. So you do.
She’s made waffles. She’s trying. She knows you like them. But if you ever tell her why you like them, she’ll probably never make them again.
It’s just a feeling in the back of your mind, one of those glass-shards of memory that you keep gripping onto. You’re pretty sure waffles were someone’s favorite. You can’t remember who. You can’t remember. But you still try to.
She gets a call. There’s something happening downtown. She grabs her wand, goes to head out. You don’t ask to come along; you’ve already argued about it too many times. Normally, you’d fight together, you and her and … But you’re not well. Haven’t been well since that battle with… something else you can’t quite remember. Something you really would rather forget.
She leaves, shuts the door, locks it behind her. You stand there, looking at it for a while. Then you go sit down on the bed.
Your wand is still there too, in its drawer. The bright red gemstone glitters with magic. Yours is red, and hers is blue, and… that’s it. Red and blue, equal and opposite, just the two of you. But you keep on wondering, was the third color yellow, or green?
You feel lonely and lost. There was someone else. You know there was. You remember three wands raised together, you remember the scent of that brand of shampoo you’re not allowed to buy anymore. You feel like you can almost remember a name, perpetually on the tip of your tongue. You need to stop doing this.
There’s a reason why you can’t remember, mustn’t remember. A victory hard-won at a terrible cost. A sacrifice that will be for nothing if you keep trying to dredge up things you shouldn’t.
You remember being in love. Not with Blue, out fighting right now, but with someone else. Someone who isn’t here, who’s never been here. Someone you don’t want to let go of. But you need to, listen, you need to let go. You mutter the words of a confession, one you can’t remember if you ever got to say aloud. It hurts, not remembering. Of course it hurts. It was a beautiful confession, it really was. But it’ll stop hurting if you let yourself forget. For your own sake, for everyone’s sake, for the world’s sake, please, you have to let go of me—
She’s shaking you awake, slapping your face. You don’t remember when you fell asleep. The shadows in the bedroom don’t look right. There’s too many of them, they keep on moving, writhing in shapes like knives through your eyes. As you lose track of what you were thinking about, the shadows recede, retreat, fade away.
She’s shouting in your face, clutching you by the collar of your shirt. Asking what it’s going to fucking take, what more she has to do, why she can’t leave you alone for one fucking hour.
She doesn’t know what you’re thinking about, doesn’t remember anything. She just knows you need to stop.
She’s crying now, confused and upset. You’re not sure if you remember how to cry. She wraps you in a desperate, clinging hug and buries her face in your shoulder. You let her hold you, let her squeeze tighter, let her hands wander to the edge of your shirt, let her push you down onto the bed.
Every time she pulls back from a kiss, there’s always this look in her eyes as she looks into yours. Searching. Jealous, of no one and nothing. She tells you to say her name, and you do, moaning it as she tries to fuck the past out of you. Her name, and her name only. Again. Again. Again.