Denying your only wish

From Betweenlines

There was a thousand different fabrics in Asukai Tsukiko's bedroom. When Ariel had been younger, and smaller, before he was old enough to know that playing with his mother's dresses and her makeup was not good, was something not allowed (but that he craved somewhere beneath his skin, on the days when it seemed unbearable: half the time he could accept himself as he was, be comfortable in his own skin, but half the time he felt other and couldn't pin a name on it), he had been endlessly fascinated by the different colors and feel of the fabrics beneath his hands.

And now, despite himself, despite everything, he found herself back in her bedroom, looking through her clothes. She would be gone for a few days, off in Chicago, and despite the little voice in the back of his head screaming that this was wrong, that he shouldn't be doing this, another little voice whispered yes, yes, and he reached out and touched and one of her formal kimonos fell to the ground, a furisode that she had kept, despite being for unmarried women (but then, she wasn't married anymore), and without thinking, he picked it up.

His first inclination was to put it back where it belonged, but something, that same little voice, stopped him.

It wasn't hard to get out of his own clothing, and he was of a height with his mother: the furisode fit, mostly well, after he somehow managed to struggle into it (putting it on all wrong in the process), and she left cosmetics lying around. Until, in her full-length mirror, he blinked at himself, and did not recognize the doll-like girl with his hairstyle standing there, dressed in his mother's furisode. Something in him ached, the same half of him that longed to be complete (the same part of him that was both, not one, not a boy only but not a girl only either, but two), and then suddenly his fist was punching the mirror because he couldn't bear it, glass hit the floor with a crack and a large crack ran through the mirror.

Ariel couldn't get out of the furisode fast enough, and without thinking, left it crumpled on the floor, grabbing up his clothes and running into his bedroom and slamming the door behind him, where there were no mirrors to remind himself.