41 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
41 lines
2.2 KiB
Markdown
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weight: 4
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date: 2020-06-17
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---
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"Who asked you?" I jeered at the beginning of this whole process, to which you responded, *Who invoked me?*
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> You did.
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I did. I did it consciously, intentionally, with foresight and reckless disregard of whether it was a good idea or not.
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And yet as Rax mentioned --- as I mentioned to them --- I am not necessarily on the plural spectrum myself. I am Madison, and you are my ally. You are a literary device based on a deliberate misreading of a literary device. You are a deliberate effort. You are artificial. A construct.
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> Am I?
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And now we come to those strangely-shaped thoughts. *Are* you, though?
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Are you a literary device to be wielded, heavy handed or not, in the service of a writing project? Are you a metaphor that I let get out of control?
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Or are you me? Are you me talking to myself? Are you me thinking out loud? Are you me processing grief, processing trauma, figuring out how to experience joy?
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Are you me?
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> Am I?
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Are you a synthesis of the two? Are you some combination of metaphor and self? Are you a portion of me, some ill-defined segment walled off or set just offstage and given voice?
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Are you then still me, or are you something else? Something other? Are you like depressed Madison, someone I can sit and watch, however metaphorically, act, however metaphorically? Are you speaking in my voice? My *true* voice? If I am me and you are, as I say, the shape of my hands displaced half an inch behind my own, navy blue and trimmed with sea-foam green, are you then in some sense *not* me? If, when you speak I find myself tasting blood, is that not a sign?
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> Am I?
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Matthew is dead and that, in a way, makes him another person. I was...something in those intercalary years before Madison; I existed, of a certainty. Perhaps, as I've said, I am going through another death, too. Perhaps that part of me that started this process has already died.
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[*To start a project is to kill a portion of yourself,*](https://gum.co/ally-making-of) I wrote, and perhaps I had a hand in my own demise twice over now. Many, many times over, for have I not started many, many projects?
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I will accept plurality in serial. I am a different me than ever I was before.
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But are you me? Does plurality in parallel apply here?
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Are you me?
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