I Am And I Am Not

Margot imagined all shadows to be red. Stained, beaten, and bleeding. If the shadow was the other self, the self that we hid but the self that always followed; Margot knew her shadow would be red.
Born Mahasim Naqab Khan, Margot let her shadow consume her identity like a drop of blood in water. First like smoke, then the crimson ribbons consume the ocean in its entirety.

There was no beginning to Margot’s identity. Her process of self-actualization had no start gun and no end of the line ribbon. There was no shadowy voice that whispered to the aches in her cerebral and drew out Margot, the hidden white girl within. No, it was substitute teachers that didn’t think Mahasim was worth half a breath and kids on the playground that thought ‘Motherfucker’ was more fitting.
Her mother had told her stories about how Margot—Mahasim’s grandmother had searched for her name in the stars, asked the gods and drew her name from clouds of fate.
Henna stained hands studied Mahasim’s birth chart for long hours under moonlight, a dish of cardamom tea beside her.

The name Margot came from a pulp fiction novel Mahasim found discarded on the subway.

Mahasim used to breathe in her mother tongue. Every inhale was of the past and every exhale the future. She barely recognized her throat closing in until she opened her mouth, only to swallow water. Her head had been plunged into seas of lost words.
The vanished tethers to a language incomprehensible but not unfamiliar. Histories upon histories of the Mahasim’s of the past. The women, the mothers, the warriors. Gone.
Gone in broken Arabic and drowned in the prose of her shadow. Mahasim had forgotten how to breathe.

As Mahasim disintegrated, her shadow grew stronger. Margot bled into her honey skin, Margot suffocated the curls of ethnic hair, Margot pretended to scoff at the goddess in a Naqab when out with Margot’s friends. Pretend. She wished it was pretend. Margot had consumed the very essence of Mahasim’s identity. An identity the delicate hands of goddesses had crafted from clay.

The blood of her shadow stained her heart too. Margot drowned Mahasim’s discomfort in cheap perfume and skirts that were barely there. She smothered quiet tears and shut her eyes when the skirts came off. She walked Mahasim home, in empty darkness when the perfume wore off. Because that’s who Margot was. Ripped from a faraway thought floating in cerebral fluid, Margot was a faraway person.

Blood. The essence of her shadow was forged from blood. Blood at her teeth and blood on the playground. Blood at her wrists and the blood that was the tether to her ancestors.
Like blood in the ocean, she could no longer tell where Mahasim ended and Margot began.

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