Every Missing Piece

Artwork by Ada Chan

 

Everyone starts off with a clean slate. A fresh board and a brand new array of chalks set with the expectation of creation. Most may not turn out to be great, but every stroke is of paramount weight. They carry the potential to be anything—or at the very least, to be something. Every soul carries their board within them; it shifts with their spirit. Chalkboards become well-worn journals, broken down pairs of pointe shoes, or vintage cameras that hold stills of defining moments stuck in time. Some flaunt the plinths of their beings proudly, they stand at the very top and let themselves shine. Some shield theirs from the harsh elements, afraid that time and erosion will make them crumble. Others pick up the scattered pieces of their beings, ravaged by humanity’s many wars.

You started out with nothing. Perhaps your nothing may have been something, but for the intent of existence within humanity, you were nothing. You were born without a slate on which you could draw and you had no fingers with which you may have gripped powdery sticks of chalk. Your state was quite perplexing even then, though there was a serene sort of simplicity to living on the outskirts of existence you had not yet grasped. Instead, you latched onto the idea of the lives you were witness to. 

Your eyes were crafted first, with which you’d be able to see the boundless hues that coloured the human world. Your eyes gave way to the ridge of your brows, the slant of your nosebridge and the puff of your cheeks. Your face was shaped after a woman, she called herself your mother. You weren’t sure if the features that defined your visage had come from her, or if you were hers because you’d shaped yourself to be. Next came your laugh, hearty and booming. It always sounded just slightly distorted coming from your lips, like an echo of your father’s mirth. Last was your smile, slanting up to the right—your right—crooked and clever, just like your aunt’s.

In the mirror, you saw yourself for all you truly were; a fusion of parts that weren’t yours. Your eyes didn’t look as kind on your face as they did on your mother’s. They were too big for the rest of your features and your skull seemed to pull them in, almost making you look like a corpse. You didn’t blink as often as you were supposed to, you didn’t know how to do anything but stare or look away. Your laugh wasn’t as inviting as your father’s, and you weren’t nearly as humorous. People thought it too loud, too much. Your crooked smile wasn’t as endearing as your aunt’s without her witty charm and her relatable quips.

You poked and prodded at your skin, thinking that maybe if you stared and picked at yourself long enough, you could turn it to clay and mold it into something more—something great. Your flesh was too elastic, you could dig your nails in and stretch it until you bled, but it would just bounce back to the same meaty cage you couldn’t escape. It was as fragile as your disposition, prone to ripping and scraping and puncturing and slicing. You could scratch at your eyes and your face until the sandy brown skin was overtaken by raw muscle and tissue, the nectar of life would spill into your eyes, turning the world stinging and angry. You could claw until you were nothing but a writhing mass of meat with skin and blood caked under the chipped off nails that barely hung onto fingers skinned down to the bone. You could rip open your prison but you could never rip yourself free, you were nothing more than the parts that made you up—eyes, nose, lips, arms, fingers, nails, feet. They were you; mutilating yourself beyond repair would do nothing but expose your insides and show off the monster hiding behind the rubbery outer layer that stretches itself tight and thin over it all. Pitifully fragile, barely enough to keep it all from spilling out.

 

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

 

You were young when you stole the first piece. At the time, your crime had been a fairly innocuous one—easily excusable by childish stupidity and hardly worth remembering. You think that’s the case for a lot of your most formative moments—all things others would easily brush past. This one is burned into your mind. You replay it during silent nights like you’re stepping back in time, trying to figure out the root cause of your disease. It had almost been compulsive to do it then. When one of your classmates showed up with her nails painted a deep, glittery shade of purple you’d eyed her with envy, staring at your own. They were far from perfect, the space underneath was stuffed with dirt from your mud-streaked adventures and some of them were chipped at the corners. 

“I got a whole set of them,” she had said proudly, wiggling her fingers as her friends listened excitedly. The bottle was decorated with a logo you couldn’t quite remember and it glinted under the afternoon sun. You helplessly kicked at a rock, watching them from the outskirts of the school grounds. You’d never quite found yourself a group like the others had. It seemed like a simple, natural thing. Your classmates gravitated to each other by the pulls of their personalities, their interests, and their similarities. The athletic boys who took over the field to play soccer, the teacher’s pets who would stay behind to help shelve books in the library, and the artsy girls you were now watching were among many of the little factions that built up elementary school. You couldn’t even call yourself a floater—at times it felt like you weren’t even there, like you were as imaginary as the fantastical games that took over recesses, the ones you weren’t privy to.

Sara, you remembered her name was—it seemed so easy for her. She knew what she liked and she showed it off just as comfortably. Her friends were all vaguely similar to her, the girls who doodled on the edges of their notebooks and had cool older sisters who took them to the mall and bought them paint and in this case, nail polish. They came to school every day and knew where they would fit in, but most importantly, they seemed to exist in a tangible way that you never could. They had hobbies and interests so indistinguishable from who they were that you couldn’t imagine a Sara that wasn’t decked out in purple from head-to-toe.

It made you sick. There was a pit in your stomach and acid coating your tongue. Your nausea was nothing new, it was just another symptom of the parasite that lived in your stomach and fed off of your inadequacy. Sometimes you wonder if, without it, you would be like the rest. If it wasn’t consuming you from the inside out would you, too, be more than a skeleton and the meat and hung off of it?

Nothing about the feeling had changed, but in that moment, you had. 

Stealing the bottle wasn’t difficult—you had lingered in the classroom while the rest of the kids rushed out for recess, and slipped your hand into her backpack. Your fingers had made contact with the cool glass, a buzz of life running through your blood and the bile that’d been rising ran back down your throat. It was the first piece of you, the first you had taken.

Even if you continued to replay it during every sleepless night, you knew the first time wasn’t really where it started.

It had been easy to slip that purple bottle of polish into your life—almost seamless. You lathered it over your nails clumsily and brandished it in front of your cousins like a prize, just as proudly as Sara had. It was almost instinctual to say that you’d begged your mom for it at the store because of your love of “Hannah Montana” when you doubted you’d ever even caught a glimpse of the show on TV, but the logo on the bottle had called to you and you’d recalled Sara talking about the show with such enthusiasm that you hadn’t been able to help yourself. Later, when you were alone in the living room and your mother was cooking dinner, you flicked on the TV and found it playing on a channel you wouldn’t usually put on. As you watched, the lie began to feel as real as the bottle clutched tightly in your fingers.

After that first time, you’d become a mosaic of pieces stolen from the people around you. They were never your friends, they never even knew who you were, but you watched and you observed and when you felt that familiar parasite burrowing itself into you once again, you took something from them. Little pieces of their lives; the lion patch on a boy’s backpack at the airport, a cheap charm of a black swan you’d strung onto a chain to make yourself a necklace, a book that you’d borrowed and never returned, a fancy pen from the office of someone too important for their own good—it went on forever.

It was the only way to alleviate your pain. For every piece that ate itself up you found yourself another; for every piece that was missing you built yourself into the closest imitation of those around you that you could manage.

If it could ever have been enough, you would have stopped with the first missing piece.

 

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

 

The person you saw in the mirror never reflected the one you imagined yourself to be. You could have been anything in your mind’s eye, completely indifferent to the reality that surrounds you. It was something you liked to ponder, though you could never take a fully solipsist stance—the mirror always twisted your form into an illusory representation of your mind. What was there one second seemed never to have been in front of you the next. The longer you stared the more you lost sight of what you were. Your hands were the worst—they flickered in and out of existence in the corners of your vision until you were digging your nails into your palms, the stinging doing little to ease the alienation of your limbs. It was like experiencing every sensation through a tunnel, they came out distorted and impersonal. You were a witness of yourself rather than the accused.

It was a wretched invention capable of defying reality. It brought to mind a thought you otherwise attempted to keep caged within the dark confines of your subconscious, the impermanence of your self. The harder you focused, the more concrete your parts became. They were not entirely indistinguishable from illusions, but it was a lot easier to convince yourself of their existence than to grapple with your imperfections. After all, had you not created yourself in the image of man? Had you not gazed upon them with such longing, had you not joined them to be one with humanity? Was that not the nature of being, to change yourself in order to fit the mold of personhood? Or was that something you alone struggled with? Perhaps that was why your mouth became dry and your tongue twisted itself into knots tighter than your clenched fists at the thought of expressing these ideas. 

You had an unspeakable nature, an unfixable curse, and an undoing set with inevitability.

 

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

 

By all standards, that day shouldn’t have been different from any other. 

You were a little worse off, but you were used to the days where the hollow feeling in your chest felt massive—so colossal that it could have caved in on itself and formed a black hole that would suck you in from the inside out. It throbbed in your chest like a heart and on days like this, you could feel it beating against your eardrums like a call to war. You imagined that in place of the distinct crimson of mortality, your veins flowed with a shimmering web of stars in inky night. Nothing and everything condensed into the ichor that gave you life.

For all the grandiosity of your thoughts, you were little more than a clumsy being, unable to conduct yourself according to the situations you unwillingly found yourself in. Most notably, language. It was simple in theory—your throat, lips, lungs, jaw, facial muscles, and tongue would perform specific duties to produce sounds that had specific meanings attached to them which would be interpreted by whoever you were speaking to. A natural ability, one most people didn’t even think about doing. It was simple for you too—right up until the words you were desperate to speak reached your lips and by then, you’d fumble. They’d twist themselves around your tongue and dance around your lips as you tried to wrangle them into compliance. By the time you managed to speak a sentence, it would be too late to save yourself from ridicule—or at the very least, your own shame.

Envy once again found its resting place in the pit of your stomach as you watched a woman in a coffee shop expertly make small talk with the barista behind the counter. Like the dents that littered your driveway’s concrete and allowed pools of water to gather every time it rained, you had broken yourself down until the envy did nothing but build itself up in the cracks and craters of your resolve. Your lips weren’t enough—if they didn’t work the way you wanted them to, how could they be yours? It was a dangerous line of thought, the same kind that had led you to thievery and dishonesty in the past. ‘This is the last time,’ you’d mutter to yourself, but you knew almost without a doubt that it would not. Once you had started, continuing had become as inevitable as the crashing of waves against a shore. You had little choice but to ease the creature within you that was hungry and vindictive and in more ways than one lost; each stolen good a temporary respite before it began burrowing into your insides once more.

The object of your envy now, however, was not a simple bottle of nail polish. It was not a trinket or a little piece you could whisk away without care, it was an irreplaceable piece of someone you wanted so desperately to have for yourself. It was all of your restraint hanging off the edge of a cliff, and much like the first of the firsts, you knew this would be another act you’d never be able to come back from. Once you gave in, it would continue on forever—or at least until you were complete.

You sealed your fate as you followed her out of the cafe.

 

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

 

The lips that stared back at you in the mirror weren’t quite yours. They’d been tender to the touch at first. They were sewn on expertly but didn’t look quite right on your face. A little too big, though nobody except you was likely to notice. Now, they were almost numb. You pressed your fingers into them, pinched and pulled, but the sensations were more phantom than feeling. You twisted your face into bizarre shapes but they wouldn’t budge, a part of you as much as anything else.

When you talked, you no longer stumbled over your words. It all came much easier, like you were taking on someone else’s personality for the brief moments where you had to exercise your new ability. It was more than a performance and even a bit more than method acting, but as much as those lips were now a part of you, and you’d adopted them as if they had always been there, a part of you would always remember they weren’t really yours.

It was worth it when smiling no longer made you want to crawl out of your own skin and speaking was as easy as you imagined it to be in your head. After all, what would be the worth of keeping your own parts, detestable and useless as they were?

 

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

 

After the lips, many more pieces followed. You found yourself becoming a patchwork quilt of a being. If Frankenstein’s monster had become what he was of his own will, would he have been any less miserable, any less wretched? You were the example, you’d turned yourself into the experiment, yet it wasn’t trial and error like anyone would imagine; you had perfected the craft on your first try. 

The you who had been was no more and you didn’t mourn; you’d been nothing but a concept then, an idea of a person not yet fully realized. You’d lived your life barely halfway until you began to take what should have been yours to begin with, and it was a glorious feeling. You were finally becoming what you were meant to be, what you wished to see instead of the self you’d been cursed with.

One of your eyes was larger than the other, a striking green against deep, soulless brown. The face of its original owner was blurry in your mind, but you remembered his bright red hair and discerning gaze. You’d carefully extracted it and popped it right into your socket after you’d removed your own—which was now kept in a jar of Formaldehyde, untouched other than the occasional disdainful glance it would get when it caught your sight. At first, it had been difficult to adjust—your new eye wouldn’t come into focus and it throbbed under your eyelid like it was going to pop right out—but eventually, like your lips, your body had accepted it as its own. It was all the more efficient at seeing, even if it strayed away from your other eye’s line of sight unnaturally. You saw more with his eye than your own, things that lay under the surface, deeper than you had originally been able to penetrate. Your new eye’s sight was sharp and quick, you caught lies before people even told them and saw their patterns like you were putting together a puzzle. The world was a lot less jumbled through his eye, and you found it much easier to navigate when you could see everything you’d been missing before.

Here and there you’d replaced your teeth with the best ones you could scavenge. No matter how hard you tried, your own would rot. Cavities would crawl into the crevices between them, shooting pain through your mouth, your jaw, even your cheeks and your head. You brushed your teeth so often it felt like you could have worn them down to nothing but little stumps, but your efforts were in vain. Your front teeth had gone first, and in a fit of desperation, you’d yanked them right out of your mouth with a pair of pliers and shoved in new ones. They were loose and fragile at first. You couldn’t eat anything solid for weeks, but in some miracle your gums had tightened around them and like all the rest of your teeth, they’d found their place. Your new teeth didn’t rot like the rest, but you’d replaced so many you could hardly remember which had been yours to begin with—or if any of them were left.

One of the principal additions to yourself was your favoured hand. It was distinctly real. The skin was tight around the underlying muscle and you could clench it into a fist and grip things with a strength you never thought you could possess. One of the worst deformities of your previous form had been your inability to cease the shaking of your digits. At times it had even been impossible to hold a pen steady and put it to paper, your writing had become barely legible over the years until you had given up on it entirely. When you’d seen her—her perfect handwriting, the words she put down so eloquently with a vocabulary befitting one of the great authors of times past, you hadn’t been able to suppress the urge. With every piece, your patience and self control were slipping away and your marauding happened in shorter intervals. You’d taken it for your own, stitched it on and slipped the skin over your own muscle where it would connect to your arm. Your bones fused with the limb, tissue coming alive to fuse together until the blend was almost seamless.

You’d lost track of everything else you’d taken. Hair, a leg, thumbs, the list could have gone on forever. At some point it had become a more familiar sight to see the patchwork of beings than your own skin, what little of yourself had remained was a shameful reminder of your previous imperfections and soon enough, they too would be gone.

 

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

 

The high never lasted long enough. It was routine by now; a new piece and a new you to come with it. Each iteration was a new draft, better than the last, but you were addicted to making edits, so much so that you’d lost sight of the end goal. Your perfectionism kept a gun held to your gut and you never saw the finished product. You searched for all of the missing pieces, but as you added and replaced and changed you had to wonder, when would you find the final one? Would it be your other eye, still dragging behind your better one? Would it be your tongue, too sharp, emboldened by the smooth talk of your lips with a tendency to run before you could think? Would it be your very bones, the ones that couldn’t stick to each other the way they should have, leaving your joints loose and painful?

What would it be, when would it end? When would that black hole finally have its fill, when would it stop sending those throbbing pains through your bloodstream to eat up your every emotion? 

You looked at yourself again—at all of the parts that made you up—and realized you’d done a lot worse than the mutilation you had daydreamed about in the past, you’d become someone you couldn’t even recognize. There was not a piece left that you could call your own—they had been ripped out, exchanged, and thrown away. There was just the one, the one that you had loathed since you had first perceived its existence and tried desperately to wipe out of your mind. It was the piece you had been chasing after all this time, the piece that had been more defective than any other. It was the piece that had fuelled your self destruction as you pushed the blame onto anything but yourself, anything but that one singular thing. Your heart.

With hands that no longer knew how to tremble in fear you ran over that place on your chest, eyes sharp as you watched yourself in the mirror like a spectator to your own actions. Your skin was still smooth there, untouched and unburdened, so unlike its contents. You imagined your heart to be shrivelled and dead inside, barely keeping itself together. You imagined the cause of all your gravest misfortunes to be as evil as you had never let yourself see. Your fingers felt cold against your skin and you slid your palm over your chest, halting your breathing for a second as you tried to feel for that familiar thumping that would signal your ownership of life. You waited in anticipation quickly spiralling into desperation, a choked sob escaping your lips for the first time.

You felt nothing. There was no heartbeat. Not one that thumped aggressively, nor one that was as faint as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, like you remembered your mother’s to be. There was just nothing. Panic clawed its way up your throat and you forced yourself to breathe, letting out wheezing sounds as you searched your body for a pulse. Your wrists for the radial arteries, your neck for the carotid artery, your inner elbows for your brachial artery and even the tops of your feet for your dorsalis pedis artery but your veins were as still as the silence that clouded your mind. Your chest, you pressed your fingers into the left side so hard it was painful, you didn’t even care if you managed to break your fingers or your sternum, all that mattered was finding proof. Proof that you were alive.

You took in one sharp breath as your nails sank into your skin. Your tools lay abandoned somewhere off to the side, but you were too desperate to care about them. You didn’t need a scalpel when you had your own hands, the ones you had fought for. You peeled back that first layer of skin, letting it clump under your nails as blood poured down your pelvis, sticky and hot. You dug your fingers in as far as they would go and pulled back the muscle and tissue with a scream, holding onto your flesh like you would perish the second you let go. Your eyes were squeezed closed like you’d sewn your eyelids shut, partly in pain, partly in fear of what you would see when you opened them. 

When you finally managed to peel one open—the eye that was yours—you almost laughed at yourself, incredulous. There was nothing there but a gaping hole where your heart should have been and your reality crumbled around you in an instant.

 

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

 

You stole a heart. Stitching your chest closed, you let it sit in that once empty cavity, taking in a deep breath. You had a heart now, it was all over. It was beating steadily and you could feel the difference already—it came with the fullness, the completion, the life you had craved.

It didn’t last. Less than a week later, it stopped beating. You ripped open the stitches to find it still, sitting in your chest as dead weight. It was like you had originally imagined a heart of yours to be—shrivelled and dark, oozing some kind of pus as you grabbed it and squeezed hard, yanking it right out. It fell to the floor with a thud and a squelch. Your teeth felt like they could have cracked as you clenched your jaw tightly, not bothering to patch yourself back together.

You stole another. You were numb as you slotted it into place, eyes tired and hands less precise than they should have been as you sewed it in then sewed your chest shut for the second time. It would work this time—it had to. The last heart just hadn’t been compatible, you’d been reckless in your urgency and you hadn’t made the same mistake again. This time the heart would live, and so would you.

Except it didn’t. The decay was faster this time—it took just three days before you felt the last beats stuttering and fading out, that sinking feeling threatening to swallow you whole. You’d been right—there was a black hole where your heart should have been and there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.

It was easy to pretend with the rest of you. To imitate the living, to become them; you stole their parts and you worked them like they were yours but a heart was much different from a hand or a leg or even an eye. It wasn’t something you could steal, it wasn’t the final missing piece, it was the first. It was everything. Without a heart, could you even call yourself alive? At last, you had figured out what you had truly been searching for, but you might never come to find it because a heart had to come from you, and you were not someone.

You were not someone, you were not anyone.

Slowly, one by one, you shedded all of your stolen parts. Every single one, starting from the first. You peeled off the nail polish, you let everything fall off and fade away and let yourself become nothing. Not the impression of a human you’d come into the world with or the lips and the hand and the eye that you’d stolen, not the original body or the one you’d later called your own, you were once again, nothing but a spectator.

You laid yourself bare and looked at what you truly were and you heard it for the first time, that missing piece. Tha-dump.

Tha-dump.

Tha-dump.