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Sherlock had always found it beautiful in a morbid sort of way to bend over shirtless in front of an infinity mirror and flex and roll his shoulders, watching his spinal cord and the bones in his back move and jolt like jigsaw pieces. It had always fascinated him. It was like lifting the lid on a piano and watching the hammers strike their strings – there was a feeling of self-consciousness, as if it was not something that should be seen, as if it was inherently taboo or vulgar. Like walking onto the stage during a magician’s show and tugging the sheet down halfway through their act.
He could remember being much younger, only seven or eight, and first discovering this trick whilst creeping through the house his family had newly come to call their own. He remembered doing it often for a while, like he was afraid he’d soon reach a point where he was unable to do so, to witness this kind of self-performed x-ray, free of charge. How strange it is to think that even then, some part of him was already uneasy about his weight.
In retrospect he despises it, but in his youth he quite liked when his family called him nicknames pertaining to his physique. These labels made him feel special. His brother possessed his own characteristic traits – Mycroft: intelligent, composed, well-mannered. Sherlock knew he had to be different, had to distance himself as much as he could from that performance of propriety.
As surely as he knew the periodic table of elements, Sherlock knew that he couldn’t live in the shadow of someone else’s accomplishments.
He exaggerated his own petulance, took more of an interest in the sciences than Mycroft had ever cared to; he was daring and defiant and deplorable. But it wasn’t enough.
“Skinny” became his tag, his identity. Distant relatives and new acquaintances alike marvelled at how easily a thumb and middle finger could curl around his arm, the fingertips meeting in a chaste kiss. They pointed out his knobby knees and protruding elbows; he was composed entirely of sharp angles and thin measurements.
Now when his parents comment on his weight, Sherlock silently feels attacked – a frightened, feral animal, staring down the barrel of a shotgun loaded with blanks. They tell him he needs to eat more and will grow ill if he neglects to in the same breath as they lament how much his body has changed. How he is no longer the skinny boy they knew. The skinny boy they loved. How he was so tiny – “Just over a kilogram!” – at birth.
It is a near-constant struggle to remind himself that growing is a necessary part of living; he does not have to be the same weight he was at eleven years old. This fundamental, scientific fact becomes malleable in his mind. A category which he typically clings to with all the fervour of a drowning man clutching his last breath becomes something he convinces himself he can bend to his will, to accompany the temperamental tilt of his moods.
Sometimes he wonders if it’s masochism, in much the same way that he keeps a packet of cigarettes in the toe of a woollen slipper, which lives in the back of his wardrobe. Just for safe keeping, just in case. Or in the same way that he spends the train home from university retracing every pen-stroke in his notebook, cursing that the ink has failed to run with faultless fluidity. He will not lower himself to writing in black ink, despite the smoother scrawl it generally coaxes from his cramped grasp. Not even in the bone-chill of January does he wear his slippers; he departs each lecture with blue stains on the paper side of his right palm.
His life comes to exist in the space between bare feet and dressing gowns. The latter is a security blanket of the fleecy, oversized kind, and he stubbornly wears it in all stages of the year’s climate, in all home environments – even those including guests. He supposes that since they are all unwanted intruders on the residence of his mind, he has no obligation to don the so-called appropriate dress for their presence.
Nevertheless, the need for such a garment remains unspoken and unacknowledged, as each of his parents’ quiet intakes of breath – the beginnings of a question long buried in their chests – are silenced with the sharp flicker of his eyes. While his unadorned feet ground him, the chills they invite climb up his legs as one does up a frozen mountain face: in stabbing, eroding increments. As with most personal inconveniences, the resolving of which would require an alteration in his well-trodden routine, he ignores them.
Still, he continues. He watches his sunken eyes stare back at him in the jaundiced light of his parents’ bathroom, a question lurking somewhere in his pallor. There is no moonlight visible through the thin lace curtains. The light’s off; there’s no-one home, he thinks distantly. A clock ticks somewhere further within.
The details are maddening; he just wishes they would stay still. If they would, he could become accustomed to them, catalogue and calculate them. Memorise them.
But the numbers on the scale are always changing and the tape measure around his waist is never the same length as last month. His shoes fit differently depending on the weather and his trousers hang to a different length if he sits down this way or another. Every particular only remains as such for the most ephemeral of instances that sometimes he wonders why he cares to notice them at all.
He glances to his left just slightly and peers at the fragments of himself that are reproduced as far as the eye can see, courtesy of the large mirrors surrounding him. Each iteration is poised, as if waiting for a cue they are unsure they will receive. He finds himself unable to withhold them anything, these splinters of who he might have become if he had never discovered this wretched room.
Keeping his eyes raised to watch the clandestine performance of calcium and collagen, he bows dutifully.