The radiance of mosaics always catches the human eye. It draws them in, all those fractured pieces made beautiful, orderly, meaningful.
They see art.
They see intention.
They never think about the breakage. About the shattering that had to happen first.
I used to call myself a mosaic, not out of vanity or self-love, but as a warning. A confession.
I am not a whole.
I am not an original.
I am a patchwork of other people's preferences - their voices, their opinions, their favorite colors, their jokes, their rituals.
I collected them like survival tools, gluing them to my skin with the adhesive I had: need.
Desperation.
Blood.

My own likes, my own instincts, they were too off. Too strange. Not human enough to be accepted, not alien enough to be feared, just… unclassified.
Something about me made people uncomfortable. Like I was mimicking humanity slightly out of sync, like a robot a few updates behind, or a mirror that reflected something wrapped. My attempts at behaving, loving, feeling the way they did always landed wrong. I could see it in their eyes - the moment my humanness stopped feeling familiar and started to look like performance.
And maybe it was.
Maybe I was performing.
Because how else was I supposed to fit in ?

Their tones were too fluid to imitate. Their clothes too loud, their thinking too fast, too impulsive, too socially choreographed. I couldn’t match that. So I wore their hobbies instead. Their favorite shows. Their speech patterns. Their music. It was easier to wear than to
become. But I never adjusted these things to my shape - I just layered them over my absence. And they didn't mind. They never asked what was underneath. They saw themselves in me and that was enough.They smiled at their own reflections on my borrowed skin. That was the only tile they ever smiled at me.
But I grew. And the pieces didn't.
I started to stretch past them, and suddenly they didn't cover me anymore. They weren’t enough to mask the void they were supposed to hide.
And the cracks showed.
There were too many silences, too many moments I couldn't remember who I was supposed to be around who. Too many versions of me half memorized, half faked, all of them stitched together wrong.
I became a patchy mess of outdated mimicry and empty space. Not even enough to make a mask.

So what was I, really, except a collection of other people’s fragments ? What was I, stripped of what I borrowed, of what I absorbed to be digestible ? What was left when I peeled it all off? Nothing. No center. Just the glue. Just the silence.

Just the ache of having never really existed outside the mirror of someone else’s gaze.

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A little bit about the author :

Name : Moona

Pronouns : she/they

Age : 22

Location : France

My hobbies are writing, acting and modeling. Some of my special interests are dinosaurs, musicals and true crime.  

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