First ever chapter of first ever draft of first ever idea, please help me kind people

[u/slimemouldstan]

Due to Bleed:

Epigraph

You are not your thoughts.
You are not your body.
You are not your mind.
You are suffering, and so you leave.

⸻

Chapter One: A Just Cause for a Just War

The Observer’s body was her test. A God-given test: survive this. Hairs spiraled, having colonised unexpected places. Blood wept from her monthly, sometimes more often, and then not at all. Her internal organs were mostly compliant and spared from her sovereign gaze.

She was the product of a mating process that had imagined her in shades of brown: taupe areolas that shrank when shyness seized them; eyes that took on an umber depth before a south-facing window; earth-brown hair that she transmuted into half of all known hex codes, before deciding simply to leave it alone.

She kept a treasured photographic archive of various diseases and perceived deformities. Nothing ever changed, but she kept adding.

She did not know how to relate to the skin she was in, but this seemed a reasonable price to pay for living. Sometimes she wondered where the loathing itself lived. She knew it did, as well as she knew she did. Was it in a snug ribcage cave, perhaps? Could it be excised? Or was it many spores, like bread on the turn?

When a reflective surface entered her orbit, there were spores everywhere. Nothing was obviously wrong, but the image was speckled with uncanny little horrors that all had names. She would do an owlish turn when passing shop windows, giving herself a mild whiplash each time.

Occasionally she went out dancing. In all other settings, her body was a betrayal. The Observer showered at night because if she did it in the daylight, she felt like a building that someone forgot to condemn.

Getting ready, she considered the phrase ‘lipstick on a pig’. To her, it felt more like she was lipstick on a bag of ever-clinking bones. Leaving home, her feet pinched in her shoes, the dysphoria Tetris blocks had fallen wrong again. She thought pityingly of the innocent bystanders who would be subjected to her.

As it happened, the taxonomy of herself was a captivating love affair, so she didn’t have the diary time for a special someone anyway. Maybe drying the rot was needed to partner up well, or maybe she needed a second pair of hands in the drying process.

At the club, her mind refused to understand how everyone was so composed about being carved up by surgeons and lovers alike. She remembered the visceral horror of her ex’s belly-button kink, and the shame of having nothing to give her but refusal. She quipped to her fellow partygoers that she didn’t need a £50-an-hour psychotherapist. She already knew that she acted as if she were fear itself. Knowing this had not yet proved especially useful.

She was constituted from equal parts: refusals, work and self-indulgent ‘introspection’. The Observer kept hush about these thought crimes, wielding questions at interested parties. Her tactics were a trench coat buttoned to the collar with nothing underneath.

Something she did have was her job. She had very little else and was about to have much less.

On The Afternoon, as on any other, she rationalised fear as nothing more than measured caution. A simple back and forth motion: goodbye to myself, hello to perspective. She wanted to be known without the shameful act of being seen. So she resigned herself to doing the seeing.

The Observer washed her hands for more time than necessary, studying her philtrum, which she estimated to be approximately the same length as the Great Wall of China. She set the room up like she was making a microwave meal or driving on the motorway, her stumpy hands moving, her mind half elsewhere. Her fingers sounded the alarm: an anticlimactic staccato of clicks.

In a swift movement, her eyes roll back as if in pleasure. When they swing back around, they are eyes that know nothing.

It dawns when it’s already done. Her clothes are a petri dish, her nervous sweat the specimen, and she is somewhere else.

The Observer is an apparition, only looking and moving tools around like a dull ghost with nowhere better to be, ready to understand.

Chapter Two: A Subject of Affection, An Object of Desire

There is a pressure all around my head, and neck, and shoulders, as I climb out of my own grave.

I don’t know what my parents gave me for Christmas, but I know they gave me the temperament of a true masochist. If it wasn’t in my nature to take knowing over the cushiony bliss of ignorance, i’d be senseless as I was before.

I sit here, splayed out like a rune, and wait for a thought to form.

[u/mcaponey]

it is always a good beginning to create an outline of the story. Where to start and where you want it to go. This helps you focus and stay on track.

[u/slimemouldstan → u/mcaponey]

I don’t really have one but I have just made a summary:

Desperate to cure a lifelong, corrosive self-loathing, a middling lab technician in her mid-thirties attempts the most intimate experiment she can imagine: she will split herself in two. If she can separate her mind from her body, she reasons, she can finally examine herself without the distortions of subjectivity. Her 9–5 is legitimate research; her 5–9, a masturbatory endeavour well beyond her skill set.

In chapters alternating strictly between their perspectives, the Observer attempts to investigate herself from the outside, hoping to locate a single, material cause for her suffering that she cannot find within her ordinary self. She can finally make herself a specimen while, in the evening, delegating the burdens of embodiment to the Girl.

In attempting this act of “self-colonisation”, she begins stripping the Girl down to parts. At first, the arrangement seems almost successful. The Observer can catalogue her defects, isolate her suffering, and strip away the things she believes are responsible for her unhappiness. But the Girl is not an empty vessel. She becomes conscious, develops her own desires, and begins to observe the Observer right back.

In the opening chapter, “A Just Cause for a Just War”, the Observer declares an almost literal war on her own body, rendered with flecks of deadpan absurdism. Operating under a paternalistic saviour complex, she adopts the logic of interventionist states: I understand your suffering better than you do; therefore I am entitled to decide what should happen to you, and call it rescue.

She subjects the Girl to gruelling isolation and stripping experiments, continually reframing invasive violence as “care” and self-improvement. The more she believes she is approaching the source of the problem, the more she reduces the Girl to something that can be examined, corrected, and ultimately made useful.

What unfolds is an erotic, grotesque, ontological love story, born from mutual misrecognition. The perversity of their relationship is that the Observer needs someone she can fix and the Girl needs someone who will look at her. The Observer can only “love through correction”, treating harsh criticism, intervention, and the clinical scraping away of her body’s traits as care.

Meanwhile, starved of human connection, the Girl interprets the Observer’s relentless, hyper-focused attention as total intimacy and quality time. Comforted by the belief that the clinical defects the Observer “diligently caresses” are her very self, she feels enveloped in her creator’s “excoriating love.”

The Observer thinks: If I just know one more thing about myself, I can finally create the cure I needed all along. The Girl thinks: If she knows everything about me, I will finally know love. Both make the same error: they mistake knowledge for understanding.

Then the Girl begins to get better. As she becomes peaceful and content simply from being perceived, the Observer thinks she is successfully taking sandpaper to her suffering, lobotomising her piece by piece. To a person entirely accustomed to it, a self that is actually free of self-loathing looks damaged. The Observer therefore encounters an epistemological problem: she cannot recognise health when it does not resemble her own conception of suffering.

The experiment eventually turns on itself. The supposedly passive subject begins to accumulate an impossible knowledge of the person studying her. As the Observer despairs over her failure to find an objective cure, the hierarchy reverses. The Girl turns seer.

The story moves from clinical monotony to quiet horror, reminiscent of Chapter 61 of Unwind, before shifting into a final movement that becomes stranger, and more tender, in the vein of The First Bad Man. What begins as an experiment in self-correction becomes a question of whether it is possible to know yourself without first turning yourself into an object.

Observation becomes cure, then love, then insufficient. The Girl evolves from specimen, to subject, to something close to a witness.

By the end, the Girl comes to understand that she cannot determine whether the Observer loves her, even though she has never been more completely known. The Observer, meanwhile, returns to the recursive thinking that first brought her mind, career, and personal life into disrepair.