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Do you know that feeling of being slightly out of sync?

 

Like a slight mismatch between the audio and video of a really good movie. How irritating is that? Just a little out of sync, so little that no one really notices that anything is off. Except, you know that it is. You can't really put a finger on it yet because you don't know where the hairline fracture is. You look for it in the depths of your dreams, in your moments of solitude, in your reflection in the still green waters, in the conversations you should have had, in your post-arguments rehearsals, the ones you could have won but you didn't, in the bizarre thought experiments you perform, all the while talking to yourself, in the brief flashes of childhood memories of majestic dancers and dolls with broken necks and bitten off fingers. You could ignore it because that is all there was to it—a small phase difference between two waves.

Of course, the cumulative phase difference one day results in a large deviation, one so large that everyone sits up and takes notice, shocked at how someone who was so 'normal' no longer is. You sit up and take notice of how this is not ignorable anymore. It gnaws at you; you try to shut it out, for it happened only once, but on those warm, lonely days under the hum of the fan, you remember how empty it felt that day, how you had suddenly become something unrecognizable to yourself. You try shutting 'her' up in a box; even the thought of a resurfacing is unthinkable, for now suddenly there is a huge crevice, and you can see it. You don't know where it came from; you don't know if raw instant noodles will fix it. But it is right there. And now it happens often, 'she' appears often, and you feel something building from inside you, filling up all your space until there is no more of you left, suffocating you from the inside; the outbreaks on your face are proof. All it takes is a trigger- a loud voice, a breach of trust, an expressed disappointment- for her to unleash herself in all her glory. This time you don't even try to stop her, she needed to breathe, and you weren't large enough for her to grow. Now suddenly, you can breathe too; for some reason, long, deep breaths of cold air fill your head. You can't see the crevice anymore, but there is not one, but several fragments, several yous.

You sit among friends and laughter and intoxicants, you maybe even laughed your heart out, but the very next second, you are another being, watching your body laugh and drink from outside yourself. You immerse yourself in welcome distractions; it keeps your mind off of those several fragments, the several bits of you. 

Until. 

Until one day, sitting amidst your friends, you recognize the vacant look on the face of another. And he recognizes the one on yours. It doesn't take much- a quiet morning of playing with the sunshine, his hand in yours, an afternoon ride through the town in the blistering heat, a midnight walk through the phosphorescent river. With him, 'she' is not absent, 'she' is dancing across the field of wildflowers, 'his' hand in 'hers'. The fragments are suddenly taped together awkwardly, it isn't pretty, but it holds. And then you realize, in another one of your thought experiments, that what you found is a home. 

A home for the out of syncs. A home for the abandoned.

A home for broken things.