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You have a weekly routine.
Each Sunday you and Cece go to the shrine of your mother and tend to it.
Together, you clean the stone.
You rinse the vase out and add fresh water.
You pick and prune new flowers.
(Later, there will only be white chrysanthemums, but when you are young, she lets you add wildflowers.)
*
You ask her once, why she is not your mother.
When she is the one that tends to you.
But the expression she looks at you with—what you later can remember and recognize as devastation—takes the rest of the words out of your mouth.
She doesn't answer.
All the same, you never ask again.
She stays Cece and then one day becomes Celine.
You aren't sure why you made the change—you don't think she said anything directly, though you wonder sometimes if she did and you forgot it.
But it just seems like the way things should be.
You are Rumi now and she is Celine.
It's the way it's supposed to be.
*
She has been teaching you meditation and exercise since you were very young, but one day she explains why to you.
She explains the burden you will bear.
And she explains why the burden will be so much heavier on you than the other girls—yes, she tells you that too, that one day there will be two other parts of yourself and you will all work together.
You know what you are, but this is the first time she explains what it really means.
And she tells you why you will always have to keep yourself apart.
(It doesn't sound hard at the time. After all, you hardly see any other children. How can you understand what it would feel like to hold so much of yourself back?
How can you comprehend the magnitude of it before you have even met them?
One day you will know the full weight of it, and sometimes you will want to let it break you.
It won't.)
*
You dream sometimes of a figure dancing.
Over the years, she changes.
A young girl dancing ballet turns into a child dancing contemporary turns into a teenager dancing to whatever must strike her in that moment—sometimes pop, sometimes metal, sometimes strange music you don't even recognize.
But it's all phenomenal.
On other nights, your dreams are filled with sound and color. There is no clear figure in them, only waves of color and sound filtering toward you and carrying you along.
She changes too, her musicality growing and her emotions getting stronger, colors growing brighter or darker.
There is a well of anger sometimes, color deep and moody, but the joy can also be more radiant than even the sun.
You grow to understand that this is the Honmoon showing you parts of them before you even meet.
And you grow to understand that you haven't even met them, and you already want to hold them close.
Now you understand why Celine has instilled it in you that you must stay apart.
Now you understand that it will be the most difficult thing you have ever done.
*
When you are old enough, but probably still too young, Celine takes you hunting with her.
You have learned to draw your weapon the year before and have had some practice with it.
She tries to keep you safe, having you stay at a distance.
Sometimes that's enough, and sometimes it isn't.
Sometimes your mettle is tested before you are ready for it.
Sometimes there are scars left—on the both of you—emotional and physical.
But you learn from what you see and from what you have to do.
And you grow strong.
*
Celine is looking for the other girls now. She says that one of them is calling to her.
But they both call to you, every night now. Something inside of you straining, reaching out with empty hands.
You want to go with her.
She doesn't want you to.
So you don't.
*
It takes time, but one day she is coming back with one of them
She steps out of the car and Oh.
Something clicks into place.
One still missing, but half of the emptiness filled now.
One hand holding another.
It doesn't make it easy, getting along.
Even being magically connected can't get past the way you sometimes grate on each other.
(One day you will understand that she has lived a life surrounded by silver tongues and deceit.
And that she thought she was getting away from that, only to find you.
And she could recognize that you were holding back.)
But right now it just hurts when it feels like she can't see you.
But of course she can't see you.
You are hiding half of yourself.
*
Celine sends you to find your third together.
Tells you that maybe it will help you both work this tension out.
She is surely tired of the way you bicker and make faces at each other across the dinner table.
It does help, the days spent listening to the Honmoon, circling closer to something, like a pair of sharks.
It's a school you find at the end.
She is definitely inside.
You decide together to wait outside.
It is maybe the most you have ever gotten along, standing in the quiet near the door and waiting.
Knowing that she will be coming out of it.
It takes a while, the other piece of you staying inside the school late—late enough that you give each other a worried look. Both of you look away after, embarrassed, not used to the synchronicity.
But then she walks out—
and another piece of yourself slots into place, the both of them filling up the empty space inside you.
—and she sees you both.
And you see her recognize something inside you both as you walk closer to her.
And then you are as complete as you can be.
(One day, you will be able to be with them fully, letting all of yourself out in the open. But for now, this is the freest you have ever felt.)
Your father scoffs at the man on the street corner—alcohol wafting off of him and untidy clothing—and mutters to your mother about 'those drunks' as they walk in front of you.
You think about the bottle of scotch that sits in his office—restocked multiple times a week—and resist the urge to shake your head as you walk behind them.
Such public displays of disobedience never end well for you, and your brother walks behind you, ready to report to your parents like the sniveling worm that he is.
But it's harder to hold back at home, when the feelings want to burst out of you.
When their eyes are looking directly at you, hateful and judging.
Each lapse in your control is met by punishment—if not a stern hand from your father, it is days of silence from your mother.
And you think it shouldn't bother you anymore, the way her eyes glide past you like nothing is there.
But every time, the feeling of unworthiness rises up from where you hold it deep within and puts a cage around your heart.
It hurts more than when he slaps your cheek and talks down to you, the disregard.
*
You spend more time in the dance studio.
At least they let you still have that, even as you have moved away from the ballet you started with as a child.
They are too covetous of the trophies they can show off to take this refuge away from you.
Their prized show dog.
If you didn't love it so much, you would rip it away from them, but even as your hatred for them grows, so does your love of dance.
And when you are on the stage, you can't help but leave it all on the floor and give it your all.
(You will be glad you never held back, when Celine finds you.)
*
Sometimes you think you hear humming on the wind.
It comes in two varieties.
There is the low mourning sound that you hear sometimes—something like a dirge.
And then there is a different kind of pain that comes from the other—more loneliness than lamentation, but a type of grief all the same.
Sometimes you hum back—wanting to comfort, even as all that comes out sounds like anger to your ears—humming to a song of your own making as you spin and twirl, mirrors surrounding you.
*
Sometimes you see strange flashes of marks on the people around you—shimmering magenta that snakes beneath their skin.
And out of the corner of your eye, their faces turn into twisted grins, but when you turn to look, it's only normal faces that stare back at you.
But normal faces that give you a creeping sense of wrong, wrong, wrong.
Their eyes looking back at you stare only at your face, but their gazes feel like they are crawling along your skin.
*
One day you follow one of them—a man, shorter than you, but burly, with back hair hung low over his eyes.
He ducks into an alleyway, but when you peek around the corner—
just a minute later, hardly any time at all
—there is no man.
There is only a scene that your mind can't quite fathom, skittering away from it.
Your eyes skirt around the edges and you lose yourself for a moment.
When you come back to yourself, looking into an empty alleyway, you wonder if you had really seen anything to begin with.
*
You spend more time in the studio.
Maybe if you work yourself harder, dance until the breath is heaving in your lungs and sweat is pouring off of you, maybe you won't dream of it during the night.
It never works.
*
It's even harder now, to try to put on the show your parents expect from you, at home or in public.
You are so tired of the duplicitousness in public.
And the facade they expect from you, even at home.
You don't have the energy to spare for these two-faced people.
Not when you are more convinced than ever that you might be losing your mind.
*
You look away from them now, the figures that register as wrong in your brain.
You ignore the urge to follow, to do something.
What is there that you can do?
*
You spend more time in the studio.
Pushing yourself harder still, harder every day.
But on this day, session halfway done, your routine is broken by the sound of the studio door opening.
You spin, surprised, so sure it is one of your parents, come to take away the only thing that you still find joy in.
Who else would come for you here?
But it is not them.
It is a woman that looks familiar—one temple streaked with gray.
There is a strange look on her face—almost like satisfaction, but almost like grief.
You stare at her, panting as your body tries to cool down.
She steps in and lets the door shut behind her, but she comes in no further.
Some primal part of your brain registers that she is blocking the exit.
She starts to talk, asking you a series of pointed questions as you stare in shock.
They are too telling.
How could she know these things you see?
Not all of them resonate with you, but enough of them do that you start to back away, wishing for another exit.
She sees your fear, your hesitation, but also your confirmation, and she stops.
Now she introduces herself and you recognize her fully—there aren't many people that don't know of the only member left of the Sunlight Sisters.
But you still want to think she is crazy, that these outlandish things can't be true.
That this is a joke, a prank designed to mess with your head.
But the things you have seen and not seen with your own eyes tell you the truth of it.
That she is confirming something you have known deep down, even as fear of possibly having imagined these things has almost overtaken you at points.
Then, most astonishingly of all, she summons a weapon out of thin air and tells you it is made of spiritual energy.
And then—
And then she offers you an out—her eyes scanning and registering the lingering bruise on your cheek even as she says it.
And she offers you a way to learn to fight, to fight for yourself and to fight for others—to be able to do something like you wish you could have that day in the alley.
So when she offers you a hand.
You take it.
You crawl under the covers—head and all—and enjoy the dark around you.
They are fighting again—
Yelling from one of them and quiet angry words from the other.
Both sounds cause an ache in your chest that lingers.
—There is rarely silence in the house these days.
So you do your best to fill the air around you with humming instead, letting words fill the space between in your mind, even if they don't leave your mouth.
*
You wait next to the other students in the gymnasium, inhaler tucked away in your pocket just in case and a bright smile on your face.
If you put it on wide enough, maybe one day someone will look at you and see someone to want to be around.
But it certainly doesn't change anything this time.
You think that surely after enough times being the last one picked, that eventually you should get used to it.
But the pain of it never feels any less.
You take it and shove it down, locking it behind bars as you do your best to give the appearance of laughing it off.
But later, home from school, you will spin it into words on a page—make lyrics flow from the tip of the pen and land next to your doodles.
(One day, there will be two girls that will cherish every written line.
But right now, it is just you and the self-doubt living inside your head.
Your only constant companion.
Really, your only companion most days besides your notebook.)
*
You drift through the halls, looking down at the ground now. The will to smile constantly is not something you have today.
Last night they sat you down at the table, both wearing the most serious faces you have ever seen and told you.
They are done trying.
And your mother will be going back to South Korea.
And worse still, you will have to go with her for half the year, neither of them having asked your opinion on the matter and neither willing to give up in their battle of pride and possession.
*
The quieter you get at school, the louder you let yourself be in your own space.
The words pour out of you at home, and neither of your parents seem to like it, but they at least tolerate it.
Your father looks away as you tell him things though—and you can see his thoughts wander.
And every day, you see that longing appear on his face.
And your mother starts to look away from you on video calls.
Starts to have less time to talk to you.
No-one at school really wants to listen to it, but that's nothing new.
So you retreat even further, stifling the urge to tell them the interesting things you have learned.
Stifling the parts of you that find joy in the things around you.
But what you don't let yourself say out loud anymore, you still let yourself put on paper.
And you get louder to yourself, in your quiet space in the closet—towel under the door dampening the sound to anyone outside of the small room.
*
It's harder now to shove things down.
A new school and new people.
And still you are—
too much and not enough at the same time.
—and now, it's not just faces passing over you with such indifference, making you feel invisible.
Now it is taunting and jeering at you, the strange American.
And there is trying to master a language you only spoke in small amounts at home.
Just more ammunition for the other students to use.
You retreat further into your notebook.
(You don't know that you are closer now to the two people that will love you for all that you are.)
*
There are no more big smiles when you go back to your school district in America.
What is the point when none of them will like you anyway.
You wear headphones now, in between classes.
Blocking out the sounds—a habit that started in South Korea.
You are glad of one thing.
Your songwriting is getting better than ever, though you don't speak the words to anyone but yourself, in your closet at home.
You have filled multiple notebooks now.
The one you keep most hidden—full of yearning for something you can't even understand—never leaves the closet.
It's too full of strange drawings in the margins—figures that haunt your dreams and the corners of your vision.
Entities with smiles stretched wide and snarling teeth in full view.
Flashes of blue light.
But that notebook is also full of the feeling that you get when you glimpse purple or pink hair.
Something inside of you wanting to recognize, wanting to say—
Oh, there you are
—but they are never the right ones.
And doesn't that make you feel insane.
The "right ones" of what?
How can you be searching for something you have never known?
For people you have never consciously seen?
But you are searching, all the same.
*
But then one day, only a week or so into being back in South Korea, there are two figures silhouetted by the sun in front of you when you leave the school late—the library a perfect place to escape the other students and the chattering of your new step siblings at your mother's house.
(Step siblings you haven't even gotten a chance to know, and a wedding you weren't even invited to, even as they were a part of it.)
You can't be sure, but you think they are edged in purple and pink. The two colors that cry out to something within you.
And they walk closer, coming towards you directly.
And you have to stop and lean against the door that has just closed behind you.
Almost overtaken by… something.
What is this feeling?
And why does it feel more like coming home than going to either of your parents houses ever has?
They walk closer still and yes, now with the sun not directly behind them, they are the colors that cry out to you.
And their faces tell you that they are seeing the same thing in you—the expressions of finding something they have been looking for.
And how do you know that?
How do you know what either of their expressions should mean? On these two girls you have never met before?
But you do.
Then they tell you things that should sound crazy, but things you think you already knew.
And when they each reach out a hand.
You take them.