In my room, I close the door with the kind of care that takes over everything else. The laptop sits on my bed like a square of cold daylight. The mug of tea is an open throat. The closet door leans open a fraction, expecting me, inviting me.
I lie down on the floor. The carpet makes a sound. The doll is against my chest, and my heartbeat makes its glass eyes tick lightly against its skull. I press its head up under my chin, and the seam there rubs the underside of my jaw.
It is too much, too neat a feeling, like someone built the world for this exact friction.
I could call someone. I could send one picture—my forearm, the run of fur, the way the light catches the new cut of my teeth - and ask, do you see me? But the idea of showing anyone makes acid bloom under my tongue.
What if they come?
What if they open the door and flood the room with their light, their breath, and their big slow ignorance?
I would have to move in ways too fast for them to see, I would have to hide, I would have to bite.
Besides, it isn’t medical. The thought arrives with such certainty. It sits there and does not ask whether I agree. Nothing on the internet covers the way my ears can tell when my father changes channels with the remote. Nothing explains how the scratching in my walls speeds up when my mind speeds, how it slows when I slow, how it answers me. This is not anxiety gnawing its tail. This is teeth, this is fur with a direction, this is a map unfolding under my skin and the only way through is to follow it.
I curl around the doll, and my knees draw up without my input. My spine rearranges into a curve that feels like a word my body knows, and my brain has never learned. The smell of cotton stuffed with old sawdust fills my nose and through it, I can smell other things; a field, rain five days ago, a basement that flooded and dried and left a ring, a cold hand that picked this doll up and put it down in a different space almost two decades ago, practicing the same careful tenderness I am pretending isn’t happening now.
My thoughts run like prey animals.
They break apart when I chase them.
If I try to think about school tomorrow, I can only get to the part where the hallway is crowded and everyone’s ankles are soft. I want to be under the benches where drops of soda dry into nice sugar crystals on the concrete. I want to wait and then go. The mean part of me wakes and stretches, and it is no longer the calculus of humiliation or the clean edge of a whispered comment; it is simpler, warmer, and wetter than that.
Make them jump.
Make them make the sound.
Make them know I am here.
I am here. I am… I press my tongue to the back of my teeth, and the name I have been using for years catches. Briar. Bri. Rrrr. The r turns raw in my throat, and becomes a rattle that vibrates through my skull.
The scratching is continuous now. Not in the wall, but in my bones. Or maybe the doll. Or the wall. It does not matter. Detail is less. Category is more. Light is wrong. I reach up, turn off the lamp and the room drops into soft darkness, the kind that folds over you if you let it.
I breathe. In. Out.
The scents reorder.
The doll’s breath—no, my breath—puffs against the fabric, and bounces back faint. I feel it in the wires now rooted in my face. They speak to me in a grammar that doesn’t need words.
Do this. Still. Wait. Go.
My parents laugh at something on TV downstairs. My mother’s laugh has a little hitch at the end that I never noticed before. My father coughs and doesn’t finish it, so the phlegm sits in the back of his throat. The distance between us is full of the house’s delicious wood. The wood is full of messages, an archive of pressure, scratches and the paths of small things going about their business.
I understand them now.
Or my body understands them. My mind tries to catch up and fails, and is not offended.
If I rub the back of my knuckles against the carpet, it makes a whispering rasp and my chest fills with small fireworks. My mouth waters. I put the hem of the doll’s pink gingham dress between my teeth. The thread bite gives, the thread sings. The sound is an answer to a question I forgot I asked.
I hold the doll as I listen to the house, and the scratching becomes my heart. Words go dim and short.
Warm.
Dark.
Safe.
Food later.
