She didn’t know how long she sat there. Time had become a loop—a skipping record. She was aware, dimly, of her physical body: knuckles white on the steering wheel, jaw clenched so tight her molars ached. She was also aware of the other Mia, the blacked-out one, walking through a house made of all the rooms she’d never let herself enter. The room where she screamed at her father for remarrying too fast. The room where she stood naked in front of a mirror and felt nothing but loathing. The room where she painted furiously for sixteen hours straight, then destroyed the canvas because it was too honest .
She pulled into the gravel lot behind her apartment, cut the engine, and sat there. The silence inside the car was a living thing, breathing with her. She should go upstairs. She should pour a glass of cheap red wine. She should let him say whatever he needed to say, and then she should cry, or scream, or pack his things into a box and set it on fire in the bathtub. Instead, she reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a small glass vial she’d forgotten was there. mia split blacked raw
That second Mia—the blacked-out Mia—did not remember things linearly. She became them. She didn’t know how long she sat there
The rational Mia, still buckled into the driver’s seat, started to cry. She was also aware of the other Mia,
She didn’t measure. She uncorked it and drank half.
It was from the summer—a gift from a musician she’d met at a residency in the desert. “Liquid memory,” he’d called it, grinning with teeth like piano keys. “One drop and you don’t just remember. You re-enter .” She’d laughed, tucked it away, and never touched it. But now, with Leo’s text burning a hole in her phone and the gray dusk pressing against the windshield, the vial felt less like a drug and more like an answer.
Leo was waiting upstairs. She knew that. And she knew, with a clarity that felt like broken glass, what she would find when she went up. He would say he loved her but not the way she needed. He would say it wasn’t her, it was him. He would say he hoped they could still be friends. All of it would be true, and none of it would matter, because Mia had just spent an hour (or a lifetime) with the version of herself she’d been running from since she was twelve years old. And that version had not destroyed her. She was still here. Raw, yes. But not broken.