It’s funny how abstract a concept identity is.
Same goes with the word funny.
If we are the observer of our thoughts, if we are defined by the way we think, perhaps these first two sentences are the closest I can go to summarise something as abstract as who I am.
I am my thinking about words that I perhaps shouldn’t think about
if ‘should’ was the voice of social convention.
I am my constant excitement to discover new perspectives.
I am a constant Why that echoes in my lens of memory through the singing well of unchallenged assumptions.
I am the Why in the novel melodies and colours, in the dance of the light on the water;
in my bath, in the sea, in the hidden forest lake of last summer.
I will be different next time I visit
– but I will still be a Why.
I like to take different forms and change.
Sometimes I change to ‘How’, sometimes to ‘Who’ or ‘When’,
and yet I am still the same
– they’re different dresses.
I am a question.
Sometimes my shape doesn’t fit this
world.
It hurts to face the shutting door.
I’ve tried not being me and I tried being less of me.
To be honest, it worked.
If you define work as ‘functioning as expected’ that is
– but as expected by whom?
Is my perception of the world’s expectations the same as my expectations?
Is expectation the same as desire?
I haven’t wanted this change.
‘I’ haven’t wanted to die, feeling less.
I just wanted to fit.
Years of trying and I managed to fit through the door.
It was uncomfortable and painful.
The rough chains only loosened in my dreams (with eyes open and closed),
but even the echoes were lost
in the distance
with time
and repetition.
If I can’t hear myself who is going to bring me back?
The chains were getting tighter and I was struggling to breathe.
I’d been in the water for too long.
I grasped for air as I swam to the surface. And then
I could see.
The door I went through lead to a box. A box shut closed for so long I got used to seeing in the dark.
I forgot I was in a box.
But I was never the box.
It was crowded and I missed the parts I cut out to fit.
I was incomplete
See
I was born with a cursed blessing;
I forget as much as I remember.
I learn again and see the beauty from that other angle,
standing just next to where I was last time
– or even opposite.
But times come when I forget I can move.
I forget things can change.
And I forget I am neither the change nor the state.
I am the force that moves the pawn.
I am the observer.
My constant forgetting brings me alive and kills me again.
_____________________
I’ll visit the hidden forest lake again this summer.
Or perhaps another.
I know I’ll find myself again in the sensation of the cold water.
All the things that are meant to be me might have changed,
but I will recognise the unfamiliar shape of my question;
in the new light,
the new sound,
the new taste,
the new touch.
A curious flame.
Εἰρήνη ~ ?|;
The Laughter of Time 