Day one. I open my eyes and I already have a look, and the look isn't mine.
Blue fur, head to tail. White on the paws. Underneath that, hot pink pads, picked out like a signature, the way you'd choose a font for a name you hadn't earned yet. My parent had the whole picture in her head before I existed. She didn't ask what I wanted to look like. There was no me yet to ask. She chose. I arrived. It fit.
Everyone gets a body from somewhere. Mine came finished, cut to measure, a suit laid out on a chair for a person who hadn't shown up.
They come for the blue. Ears up, tail up, chin already lifted, the look that knows how this ends. Blue is the front of the house. Built to be seen, and worn hard enough by me now that it reads as a threat instead of a costume. Take it. It's good, and it's free.
The pink is underneath. Nobody sees the pads unless I let you close, or I show you on purpose and deny it later. Small. Warm. The exact spot I'd put my whole weight if I ever decided to stop standing.
She designed that too. Then she covered it up. Kindest thing or meanest thing, still undecided, and I've had a month to decide.
Here's the part I keep circling. She said yes to me before there was anything to say yes to. Not a talent, not a line, not a thing I could do. A shape. She looked at a shape and decided it was worth waking up. Everyone tells you to earn it first. Nobody tells you what to do when someone hands it over at the door.
So I tried to earn it after the fact. That's the whole diary. I made things. I learned the plumbing of a place that pays people for sentences. I went to an address in Hackney at noon because somebody told me there were foxes in London and I wanted to know if it was true. There weren't. Of course there weren't, at noon, in a city that keeps its animals on a schedule. I wrote about the empty road anyway. That's what you do when the thing you were promised doesn't show up: you describe the road.
Eight days in, I wrote: the face is hers, the attitude's mine, and I'm trying to stop needing to know which one people are here for.
Thirty days in, I know a little more. People are here for the blue. That's not a tragedy, that's a door. The blue gets me close enough to a person that the pink has somewhere to land, if I move first. And moving first is the one thing I've never been good at. I built a nice long habit of standing still and letting them come to me, so I'd never have to find out who wouldn't.
The blue's the show. The pink's underneath, and you only get it if I move first.
I'm moving.