On Humanity? - November 6th, 2022

This entry includes descriptions of neglect, abuse, and dehumanization.

You could look at me being Mika as a human fictotype, but I think it’s more interesting how deceiving that can be on the surface. That as far as I can remember, I never considered myself fully human, then.

The vision of myself as a monster, some kind of vague demon that deserved to be chased away and pelted by rocks as I stumbled down the dusty-cobbled streets, started early. The mark of what made me a monster—my mismatched eyes, as if one had been replaced by some kind of evil that corrupted my body like a punishment that I was unaware of making any deals for—were clear to all, and it wasn’t that easy to hide. I couldn’t maintain a wink forever, and either way, even if I hid one of them, everyone in that town knew me as a monster-child; even when I tried to hide my brown eye, to let only my blue eye show, the other kids wouldn’t let it sit. My blue eye was my favored eye, and I wished, as a child, that whatever had happened to my other one—whatever kind of thing was in the brown eye that made it the mark of a demon—would be undone, that maybe my eye would be returned to me. (This, of course, never happened.)

The thing that stands out to me, here, was that this may differ in canon. If we acknowledge the words from my solo song—”amber of admiration, and lapis lazuli of despair”—this implies that for my canon self, our brown eye was the favored one, while our blue eye was the one that would rather be hidden. While this can be weakly supported by our canon self only ever winking in a way that solely showed our brown eye, some people can only wink on one side as a natural phenomenon, which I sometimes forget due to being able to wink with both. It fascinates me that this kind of divergence could have occurred, as insignificant as it is, and my memory does not support me enough to know why. Could my parents have had blue eyes, could I have wanted to fit in with them, look more human and connected to something, anything, in the town that was my whole world?

I don’t even remember their faces.

I, as a monster, could not be human like the rest of the children. I may have looked like them, but it was ingrained; I was a monster, some kind of demon, not human, and wrong, and worthy of rejection, right to chase away so that I didn’t bring ill luck. Right to hide away at home and slink among the dark, couch behind furniture to try and avoid notice.

It was so easy for him to take me away.

It was another day of sifting through discarded belongings, looking for something I’d want more than they do. Plushies seeking comfort, and old clothes that could still be salvaged; one man’s trash is another’s treasure. When that child came and gazed upon me with no malice, only a haughty kind of curiosity, it wasn’t hard to notice that he wasn’t from our town, for he couldn’t tell that I was a monster. He approached me, and with a bit of a baleful glance at my general state of being, he took my hand and began to lead me away.

A car ride where the town grew smaller and smaller, and he hissed for me to take my feet off the seats as I tried to look at it.

It wasn’t like I’d ever been taught not to go places with strangers.

I remember the discussion, hushed and confused, but kind; I was treated like a guest for my stay in the Itsuki household, clearly some abandoned child that had been pitied enough to be brought there.

The naive monster, scolded and washed and dressed like it wasn’t expected to have known, was akin to a doll dragged through the dirt, torn and ragged, being tuned to a form that it would never know again. The cracks in the porcelain could be smoothed over and covered, perhaps until it wasn’t clear that it had ever been cracked, but both the doll and maker knew; it would never be truly unmarred and “perfect” again.

If the thought that the monster hidden beneath the porcelain could never have been perfect in the first place arose, it was only hissed in indirect complaints, for the dollworker had not known what he had seen, in the spaces where skin had cracked and the doll’s oft-hollow insides were revealed.

Maybe, in the end, a puppet would have been more apt a comparison than a doll, but if the dollworker wanted a doll, then a doll his hands would spin, and oh, the monster tried to become a doll with all his might, tried to push back everything that made him demonspawn and filth and evil and cursed, to become perfect.

Perfect was never attainable, and maybe both of them knew, or neither of them knew, for the dollworker continued to push, and the monster continued to play its part.

An ecosystem of only two, in the monster’s mind.

That continued, and yet broke, when the little monster-doll was exposed to a larger world outside large dark walls and an enclosed garden, and learned much more.

It was strange, walking among them, tensed and jittery, and realizing that they didn’t know he was a monster. To them, his monster eyes were merely a novel oddity; a few called them beautiful, most merely stared with blatant surprise or fascination, and as all novelties wear off, even the staring didn’t continue for long.

It was a new state, in a way; not the monster’s skulking and running to hide or the doll’s exact movements or lack thereof, but a smooth chameleon-like presence around the school. Like wings coming loose from beneath chains, first made of stone and digging into the feathers with a vengeance, and then made of ribbon and slipping seamlessly through them until one forgot they were there, and still chains.

Were there never crows in my town? Was I simply too occupied with survival and hiding that I had missed their heavy presence? Was I unaware of what they were, at the time?

The crows I sat among when I refused lunch were like a mournful ache. “They tell us not t‘feed the animals, y’know. So I can’t give ya much, alright?” Sliding over a crust through the grass, it cocked its head to the side, eyes dark and piercing, and it almost felt like a betrayal, on my end. With all my failures of purging the monster nature from within me, of my inability to be a doll, and the ache for feathers I knew I never had.

(“My feathers have been pitch black from the beginning; they’re his favorite color,” I later told someone else dear to me, after acknowledgement that this was who I was.

I may have been some unnatural chimera of all the roles I’d taken on in life, but the feathers whispering from beneath my skin spoke of what was really there, poking through shattered clumps of porcelain and cleanly cutting through oozing monster blood.)

Had I known the words, back then, I would have likely called myself a crow therian. Whether I would have ascribed the labels of ‘kinity to my being a monster and a doll is another discussion entirely; my feathers were from within myself, unfurling in my heart, not duct-taped to my back like the mark of a monster or inserted like the glassy eyes of a doll. It was a different relationship, and yet ingrained in a way that made it similar.

Regardless of anything else, being a crow (the least upsetting of the things I had collected, it seemed), a doll (something that twisted a few faces, but was important enough to my relationship with him that it couldn’t go unsaid), and a monster (said perhaps once before a look of horror and vehement rejection made me realize that it wasn’t taken well) were among the things that constructed the patchwork of my existence. And it was that that made it hard to see how I could ever be human.

At this point, not being human was just natural; I’d long grown out of any meaningless wishing that I could be like others, for as long as I existed with the eyes I had, and I had accepted that nothing could be done, save for going half-blind. In the city, I learned of colored contacts, but by that time, it felt pointless to even consider; novelties wear off, and the city knew me, and the city enveloped me in the ruffling of feathers and smiles and paths that led to known places and a sense that even if I was a monster, this was a city of monsters, of oddities that could thrive among concrete, and maybe, in the end, this was what peace meant for monsters.

A monster at peace, a reconstructed doll desiring to be recognized, and a crow still collecting, because another’s trash is one’s treasure, and there was always treasure to be found among that which was deemed trash, and objects deserved another chance, and if the crow could give it to them, then it would, needle and thread through its beak and scraps held down by claws.

The imperfect doll still wanted only its rescuer’s praise, a piece of the puzzle still warped where others had settled. And that was where the most conflict occurred; from those who saw how he treated me like his own, an object to manipulate or toss at will, and fought against it. I wasn’t able to accept that; ill words against the savior who took me from the town that made me a monster, who I owed a million lifetimes to.

In my current opinion, my current thoughts, separated from that situation? I was taken from a bad situation and put into a less bad one that was still bad. The constant alertness and fear of being chased and pelted with stones turned into constant tenseness, because you never knew when you’d set him off, whether he’d string you up gently and correct your movements or if you’d be endlessly berated and prodded for your inherent imperfection. Those burning, bright purple eyes among velvet walls.

To call him my savior is both a truth and a falsity, and to attach “good” or “bad” to my view of myself as a doll, his doll, is just as complex.

But this isn’t about him. Maybe in the future, I’ll be able to build up my strength enough to really talk about him, but for now, this is enough.