I am a pocket of noise pretending to be a person and it is collapsing like bad drywall. I peel myself back and there’s nothing but layers, layers and layers, old skin, newer skin, paperwork of cells stacked like receipts that say I bought myself yesterday and the day before and the day before that. I touch my arm and it answers with the same hollow feeling as when you press a thumb into a bruise: familiar, then gone. familiar, then gone. familiar, then gone.
Who put these words in my mouth? i say “i” and the mouth obeys, but who owns the “i”? It’s a trick. a mirror with every shard showing a different version of the face, each one arguing for tenancy. one says it remembers the childhood friend. one remembers the last fight. one remembers the exact taste of the lime i never ate. they all shout at once and i can’t decide which memory gets to be me today. Maybe none of them have a lease.
I imagine cutting out a piece of myself like cutting out a page from a book. I tear it, this thought that used to be whole, out, and watch it float away like confetti. Someone else picks it up, glues it into their own volume, and calls themselves whole. Who decided that continuity is an owner’s manual? Who decided a name is a lock on an empty room?
Sometimes I stand very still and try to feel the seam where yesterday meets now. It’s like running a fingernail along a jagged scar and finding instead of scar tissue a tiny door that opens onto another person’s kitchen. That person is making coffee with my hands. They hum a song I hummed when I was five, but the lyrics belong to a stranger. I want to scream because the engine of me keeps swapping parts and the driver’s still asleep in the backseat.
my thoughts are luggage on a carousel, looping the same baggage claim forever. pick one up, it’s lighter than you remember. put it down, someone else has already replaced the label. memories become museum exhibits i can visit but not live in. I touch them and they flake. I press my palm to my chest and expect a heartbeat to answer “this is me”, but the drum inside is a rental, a tempo borrowed from a playlist marked “temporarily available.”
if identity is a house, someone’s renovating nonstop and forgot to tell me. walls move. floors are swapped. The portrait over the fireplace is replaced weekly into a different smile that looks suspiciously like mine, but greyer around the eyes. i keep sweeping, painting, nailing things in place like a carpentry addict, but the nails bend into questions. The house becomes a hall of mirrors whose reflections have unionized and are demanding separate contracts.
There’s a voice that keeps insisting on permanence, that whispers anchors and continuity and “you are,” like a mantra you repeat at the bottom of the sea. I try to believe it. I clinch against the current. but the ocean presses in, cell by cell, tide by tide, and the whisper is diluted into static. I begin to think the self is an accumulation of small lies we tell to make the wind stop complaining.
I am unraveling like a sweater snagged on time’s finger; every tug is a new me. one thread says compassion, one thread says hunger, one thread says yesterday’s coffee. They spool out across the floor and I watch the floor brighten, then dim, then become some other room. I laugh, but the laugh is borrowed too. it echoes and comes back with a different accent.
Maybe the point is not to be the same. Maybe the point is to be a sequence of impressive impersonations. or maybe, maybe, i am just a pile of spare parts with an overambitious name stitched on for identification, a label that reads: temporary owner. I keep checking it as if that will make the letters hold. they don’t. the glue peels. The label floats away on a breeze of molecules that used to be mine and now are, inconveniently, not. I want a map. I want coordinates to where the “i” is supposed to live. but maps are made for places that don’t move. I am all movement. I am a collection of replacements arguing for amnesty. I am a carnival act of continuity, a magician with empty sleeves. I shout and the shout boomerangs back as someone else’s echo. I stomp and the floorboards reply with different footsteps. I am doing a terrible job of being one thing, and yet here I am, doing it, patchwork and all, like a stubborn machine that refuses to admit it’s been reassembled.
if being is only ever a temporary invoice, then maybe the only honest act is to stop pretending the invoice will ever be permanent. Maybe the only honest act is to laugh until the seams finally give and something new spills out, messy, furious, unowned, incandescent, and no one can point and say, “that’s the same as before.” Maybe that’s the most sane thing left: to accept the crazy, to accept the constant theft, to accept that I am nothing but a procession of borrowed mornings pretending to be a continuous life.