What the actual fuck did I just read.

I close the notebook and set it down slowly in my lap. Then I tilt my head back and just stare at the ceiling for a while, trying to process. The darkness beyond my bedside lamp's glow swirls with mental reconstructions of passages in the journal. X's fantasies, which include a pet dragon that's almost a little too vivid to be imaginary. M's idle imaginings about crumbling suburbs and the way plants will push up through the concrete's cracks. They seem to share memories—most of them, anyway—and a mutual awareness of each other, but they couldn't be more different otherwise.

Which means there are two obviously different people writing from inside a single mind here, which, oh my god. Neither's said yet just what the other is, which means this could be anything: split personality, something psychotic, or another figment of X's vivid imagination. M questioning their own identity feels like evidence both for and against that possibility. But because neither they nor X explains, this fissure must have been going on for a while before spilling into these journals, and these journals span years. I eye the later ones. I'm only halfway through the first, and I already feel like I've run a marathon.

I lower my gaze to the notebook in my hands. Something resonates. It's not X: they feel chaotic and ephemeral, bright and vivid, but disturbingly hard to pin down. M is much more grounded. It's those cracks they spoke about. That's what's resonating with me. And because I somehow know what they mean by those, and there's one here, and I don't know what it is yet, I keep frowning until I'm certain I'll burn holes in the notebook from staring. But nothing comes.

It's after midnight. I need to sleep.

I transfer the laundry from my bed back to the table, then collapse into bed and toss and turn for hours. When I shut my eyes, visions of apocalypse linger at the edges of my vision.

The notebooks feel more normal again in the morning. I'm sure that feeling will shatter the moment I open the blue one again, but for now it's just a notebook, sitting on my coffee table, dark and pretty and a little iridescent in the sunlight coming through my window. M called the "cracks" in reality iridescent, like fractures in broken glass. I already know I'm going to see those in blue in my mind's eye from this point onward.

I can feel the notebook's presence behind me as I go about my morning. It's Saturday. I don't have class, and I should be catching up on the homework I've let languish for the last week while the prospect of meeting with dad again got more and more distracting. Instead, I wash up because I can't let myself fall out of that routine, grab breakfast, and plunk down on the couch in my pajamas. I pick up the notebook again.

I reread M's last entry.

I don't even realize I've done it until I'm done, and a twinge of disappointment alerts me to the fact that X takes over the next section again. That's the moment it dawns on me.

That feeling from last night—it's M. They're the crack. A fracture in reality allowing glimpses of a more real reality underneath, and now suddenly I know that they mean about those cracks being addictive. I read M's journal entries with a rapt attention that sucks me in so deep, the world disappears around me, at once fascinated and horrified by what I'm reading. And then horrified again by the fact that I resonate with them more than I resonate with X, though every social instinct I've developed screams alarm when I admit that to myself.

Maybe it's the extra things M writes into their journal entries. That's a more socially acceptable thing to be fascinated by than a morbid fascination with disaster and human strangeness and the end of the world. M's pages are full of side tangents and extra material: drawings, codes, lyrics, songs, poems. There's one drawing—a pool in a clearing of conifer trees—that I stare at for the better part of fifteen minutes. It's unsettling. Some of the songs are real, but the rest seem made up, and M's a good poet by my standards. X only derails into worldbuilding. When I search key words on the internet for any sign of a book, nothing turns up. But while X does talk a little about a story, they don't explain it very well, and they live it more than anything. So I suspect it might just be a feature of their internal world.

And that world is fraught. As I re-read some, then read on further, I amend my assessment that the two have nothing in common. Or that M is the deranged one of the pair. There's something off about both of them, and not just that they talk to themselves and intrude on each other's writing. Well, M intrudes on X's writing, if I believe X's version of events. I've yet to see an example of the other way around. And while that could well be X's desire not to see what M is writing, X isn't entirely stable, either.

I notice it more the more I read. X slingshots between topics with a frenetic, inchoate kind of energy, one moment musing over mundane matters, the next deep in existential angst. They talk to imaginary entities. To M, even if M doesn't seem to be there. They wonder if they'll ever have friends. Spiral into anxiety over anything and everything, from the existence of a multiverse to their own interactions with society. Once—just once—they ask what's wrong with them, but laugh a little hysterically, dance around the topic, and fall back into the pent-up emotion of a completely different topic. Where they'll go when they die. Compliments for M, interspersed with rants about them. Fantasy things that populate what seems to be the world around them.

If there's a picture of insanity anywhere, it might look a lot like this.

M, for all their darkness, reassures me somehow. It's something in their tone, their sense of humor, their gloveless handling of morbid topics, and their unrelenting, incisive, exacting self-examination. It's that reality again. Those iridescent cracks, only this time, they're cracks through X's chaos into something that feels closer to the essence of the person who wrote this. Because if there's one thing X and M are both clear on, it's that they share a mind.

The next journal entry beneath my fingers is X's. I don't realize I'm skimming it until something grabs my eye with a shock of recognition so strong, my finger leaps to the page. It lands on a city name. This city's name. I should have expected these two lived here—few people misplace furniture to a different city—but the sudden grounding in reality makes me reel a little. I check the date on the journal entry. Eight and a bit years. I haven't gotten a clue to X and M's age yet, but X feels young. Mid-teens kind of young. If they're still in the city, they'll be around my age.

The starkness of the city name makes it dawn on me that not once so far has either person given personal details of any kind. They don't even call each other by real names, though with M's propensity for codes and X's extensive in-world vocabulary—complete with acronyms I can't remotely parse—that's almost unsurprising. But though I've read through most of a year's journaling already, there's been no mention of a birthday. Nor of ages, school, neighborhood, street, any identifying local events, or even the names of friends or classmates. These last are all in codes. The rest are simply absent. X is more concerned with their chaotic inner ramblings, and M seems to prefer parsing the world's meaning over listing its frivolous details.

I bookmark my page and open each of the notebook's covers again. Daylight only confirms what I found last night: a total lack of personal information. This goes for every notebook in the stack. Their pages are journaling from cover to cover. If X and M wanted to get their journals back after misplacing them, they've done a bad job of ensuring whoever found these could return them again.

I vow to keep an eye out for more identifiers, then return to my bookmark. I force myself to read everything on the page, but as more pages wear on, I return to skimming X's parts in favor of the ones that bear M's distinctive voice. I don't know how I can spot it. Sometimes they do intrude on X's journaling, often when the two work together to worldbuild X's world. M mostly lingers, but now and again contributes ideas that send a delightful shiver up my spine. They have an eye for the strange and unknown and unusual. For things we can't explain, and that are all the more fascinating because of it. X rejects most outright, but later, in secret, brings them back again.

Addictive. The cracks are addictive. I pause my reading and circle back again, to one of the earliest journal entries. One where X kicked M out of the room so they could write in whatever privacy is afforded to you when your mind is a house and the only thing separating you from your compatriot is an imaginary door.

I'm going to shut M out for a moment, because I want to say that they scare me.

They scare me, too, but not as much as my logical side tells me they should.

Not just because they're scary. Because they're right, and even when they're wrong, I sometimes can't help but listen to them. I read their journal entries. They're so dark, but I can't stop reading.

I don't like to admit this, but sometimes I'm jealous of them.

That might be the most relatable thing I've ever seen from X. More relatable, even, than their talk of normal and people look at me weird and wanting to fit in, because that's another thing I don't want to admit resonates. That there's a part of me, even after all these years, that still cares when people look at me sideways, and wants to be something more invisible. I hate that want. It's not shiny. It's ugly, and not in the iridescent way of the cracks M searches for. It's the kind of ugly that makes me want to hide it in a drawer, then grow and change and shape myself to eliminate it forever.

Which is better: always, always, always being true to yourself, or being able to adopt any character you choose?

I don't want to deal with that question. I snap the notebook shut and find that hours have gone by; it's midafternoon already. I toss the notebook on the couch behind me. I should feel bad about mistreating it, and for a moment I do, but then I don't. These two have done something to me, and I don't like it. I dig lunch from leftovers in the fridge, but it's actually closer to dinnertime. I need groceries. Still twitching with restless energy, I leave the house and have to force my hands into my pockets to keep from rubbing my wrist as I walk. This is not the day to be stimming in public. Not with my mood like this. Once I start, I'll never be able to stop again.

And I still don't have my bracelet.