mousme | Past noodling (Reply)

Kay's latest post reminded me of something I wrote last year, before I even had a LiveJournal. Specifically, it remined me of the 9th paragraph, but I've decided to reproduce the whole Angst-ridden piece here. It's the kind of stuff that I swore to myself as a teenager that I would never, ever write, but here it is nonetheless.

I am a fragment. Never whole, but belonging to a greater whole; something larger than myself, it swallows me, and my utterances disappear into the white noise of the world.

I do not have a voice. I am an echo, unconsciously parroting the words of those who came before me. My voice, my words will never be mine, have never been mine. I am an amalgamation of fragments, but they do not merge or come together. I can feel myself floating in the interstices of all that I have learned, touching but not understanding, aware but not comprehending.

Who are you?

I look in the mirror and a stranger gazes out at me. I have become "Other," unknown and unknowable to myself. Self–awareness only shows my a void I seek alternately to fill or to escape.

Cut too deep and you will find there is nothing underneath. I am nothing but a bleeding shell.

I don't want to be alone with my thoughts. The very idea terrifies me. My thoughts are not my own, but those of someone else: the person I should be, the person I should have been, the person I should become. They taunt me, laugh at me while I drown... My conscience persecutes me, reproaches me for everything I haven't accomplished, for everything I've done wrong.

Who are you?

The question itself is a reproach, the cliché a reminder of my deficiencies.

I have never been myself. I am a series of personas, different for each person I encounter. It's easier to be someone else, or rather, variations of myself. Everyone sees a small portion of the truth, and yet if everyone I know put their portions of me together, they would not come up with the real me.

Fragments.

I am nothing. Emptiness, defined by the things that surround me. Take them away, and there is nothing left to see. A void, complete in its emptiness, as though the mind's eye had gone blind.

I am a shadow, visible but ignored, translucent and opaque, intangible but present. I can only be perceived out of the corner of your eye. I make no sound, I move within infinite possibilities but cannot exist without light, without someone to pull my strings, without a beholder. I am alone in the midst of multitudes, and vanish if the light shines directly upon me or too brightly. I grow in corners and flourish with little care, but wither and die if completely neglectd.

Put out your hands and I may vanish...