Anastasia Bryce
sharesharealike
So I'm a little too fond of writing conflicted personalities, and I decided to take that concept to its extreme conclusion. Result: a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde-ish girl whose two sides only know the other exists because they both kept a diary.
It wasn't a wonderful discovery to make.
One side of this worrisome twosome is known as Anne; the other refers to herself as Stas. It stops them from getting confused, and it neatly sidesteps the fact that each assumes herself to be the original.
Imagine for a moment that about half of your life so far comprises of periods when you've been doing stuff you can't remember. Yeah, that's why they dropped out of school (they had to learn everything twice), that's why they can't hold a job for any length of time (same problem), that's why they've never taken driving lessons (switching personalities behind the wheel? Not on the top ten list of Safest Activities), that's why they've never been able to hold down a serious relationship (men have a word for girls who can't remember you the morning after, and it isn't "long-term partner").
Anastasia lives with her wearily understanding cousin Mickey MacDonald (yes, he's heard all the jokes), and tries and fails to make something of her life. Stas' opinion is that they are stuck with the situation, and so she tries to make the best of it: she shoplifts to make ends meet, feeling guilty for sponging off her cousin, and she tried to tell him about Anne, though she doesn't know whether or not he believed her. She's far and away the more direct of the two, bluntly sticking to the truth and focused on the destination, whereas Anne is more likely to take the indirect route and to stop and examine the scenery.
Whilst both sides let most of their family go along with the assumption that she's bipolar with memory loss, Anne attends secret psychiatric sessions with an eventual view to getting rid of her other personality. When Stas woke up during one of these, she was furious: she saw it, fairly understandably, as going behind her back, a thing which she would never dream of doing. She was shocked, not expecting Anne to do something like that, even though to Anne it had been the most obvious and correct solution. And, you know, Stas wasn't so hot on the idea of getting psychobabbled into oblivion. So they had a huge fight about that, so far as it is possible to when you can only communicate maybe twice a day via letters, and Stas for one is still smouldering about it.
It doesn't help that Stas is so unforgiving of others' faults: Anne is better than her in that area, probably because she is so acutely aware of her own. In fact, whilst Stas has a more black-and-white outlook, and favours the truth however painful, Anne is more aware of the shades of grey and is ashamed to admit that she is something of a habitual liar. She does not know that Stas steals, or that she tried to tell Mickey about their true situation; possibly the closest Stas really comes to lying is in withholding these facts from her body-roomie. She thinks that Anne is too much of a nervous goody-goody to approve, and thought until recently that she did not have the balls to make a decision by herself. Anne, from the other side of the fence, regards Stas as a Hyde side, a manifestation of subconscious antisocial urges (or some such pop-psychological explanation).
One day in a winter storm, during Stas' turn with the body, they die: she half-slips, half-is blown into a swollen river. But that's not the end of their story.
So I'm a little too fond of writing conflicted personalities, and I decided to take that concept to its extreme conclusion. Result: a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde-ish girl whose two sides only know the other exists because they both kept a diary.
It wasn't a wonderful discovery to make.
One side of this worrisome twosome is known as Anne; the other refers to herself as Stas. It stops them from getting confused, and it neatly sidesteps the fact that each assumes herself to be the original.
Imagine for a moment that about half of your life so far comprises of periods when you've been doing stuff you can't remember. Yeah, that's why they dropped out of school (they had to learn everything twice), that's why they can't hold a job for any length of time (same problem), that's why they've never taken driving lessons (switching personalities behind the wheel? Not on the top ten list of Safest Activities), that's why they've never been able to hold down a serious relationship (men have a word for girls who can't remember you the morning after, and it isn't "long-term partner").
Anastasia lives with her wearily understanding cousin Mickey MacDonald (yes, he's heard all the jokes), and tries and fails to make something of her life. Stas' opinion is that they are stuck with the situation, and so she tries to make the best of it: she shoplifts to make ends meet, feeling guilty for sponging off her cousin, and she tried to tell him about Anne, though she doesn't know whether or not he believed her. She's far and away the more direct of the two, bluntly sticking to the truth and focused on the destination, whereas Anne is more likely to take the indirect route and to stop and examine the scenery.
Whilst both sides let most of their family go along with the assumption that she's bipolar with memory loss, Anne attends secret psychiatric sessions with an eventual view to getting rid of her other personality. When Stas woke up during one of these, she was furious: she saw it, fairly understandably, as going behind her back, a thing which she would never dream of doing. She was shocked, not expecting Anne to do something like that, even though to Anne it had been the most obvious and correct solution. And, you know, Stas wasn't so hot on the idea of getting psychobabbled into oblivion. So they had a huge fight about that, so far as it is possible to when you can only communicate maybe twice a day via letters, and Stas for one is still smouldering about it.
It doesn't help that Stas is so unforgiving of others' faults: Anne is better than her in that area, probably because she is so acutely aware of her own. In fact, whilst Stas has a more black-and-white outlook, and favours the truth however painful, Anne is more aware of the shades of grey and is ashamed to admit that she is something of a habitual liar. She does not know that Stas steals, or that she tried to tell Mickey about their true situation; possibly the closest Stas really comes to lying is in withholding these facts from her body-roomie. She thinks that Anne is too much of a nervous goody-goody to approve, and thought until recently that she did not have the balls to make a decision by herself. Anne, from the other side of the fence, regards Stas as a Hyde side, a manifestation of subconscious antisocial urges (or some such pop-psychological explanation).
One day in a winter storm, during Stas' turn with the body, they die: she half-slips, half-is blown into a swollen river. But that's not the end of their story.