The Glass Scientists micro-fanfictions

Selfhood

He did wonder, on rainy nights and on breezy mornings and anything in-between, when the 'I' became 'he'.

He would have thought it was when the memories ceased appearing as if he happened to be peering through a hazy fog of delirium but rather came as a marked absence altogether. If it was not himself that houses certain memories then it was only natural for him to take the lead and consider the degree of separation as simply that. Something separate. Different. But this was not true, and he knew it on a level far deeper and more personal than the theatre of his memories would allow for.

He could have thought it was when the deeds committed by his hands became so abhorrent to him that he could never think he would choose to commit them. If he did not like the notion of the sins that he so openly and gleefully chose to delight in, then surely it could not have been his choice to act on them, so it couldn't have been himself. It had to be someone else. Anyone else, really. But he knew that deep down in the darkest pits of what mankind often considered the soul that each and every thing that he did came because he so desperately wanted it to. 

 He should have thought it was when the face that stared back at him under the harsh light if the morning sun was that of a stranger and not his own. If the eyes, green as the absinth that burned his throat on those dark and twisted nights were not his own, then neither were those wine-bruised amber that seemed more dead than that of a corpse's own. They were not his eyes. They had to belong to another. But even still he knew they had to be, for if they were not he could simply pluck them out and be rid of them before they burnt a hole in the glass but he could not. 

 He could have thought it was when his hands took on an intermitted tremor, a twitch that seemed as if there was something deep down beneath his skin that was trying to escape but wouldn't. If the way his hands closed a little tighter around the neck of a bottle as he listened to someone drone on and on with no other thoughts to find silence, it was not his own impulse. It was the impulse of a madman. He was not a madman. But he was all too aware that the notion, as dreadful as it was, felt just that little bit too right for him to discredit it as that of anyone but himself. 

He would have thought it was when his mind was clouded by dark urges of violence and hedonism and the pursuits of all the delights that life had to offer that he had been so determined to ignore. If it was what life had to offer, it had to be the life of another that it called to not, not himself. They were vile impulses. Wicked. But he knew he was just as human as all the others were and so it was only natural that he might want more than he allowed himself. 

Perhaps there was no real differentiation between what made Henry Jekyll and what made Edward Hyde, and this was a thought that frightened himself so much that he needed to distance himself from who he was. To treat 'him' as an other rather than admit he was human too.