Seraphim

Self

It's a tall order, asking me to describe myself.

It's the kind of question that plagues me at night,
that slithers in the backrooms of my mind,
until I give you a non-committal smile
and fill the silence with mindless jargon
I've gotten from personality websites.

I've always been a person who is seen best through others' eyes.

I don't have a sense of self strong enough to put into words.
Think of me as graffiti or a Pinterest board that's half-finished,
On a fixation you no longer recall, abandoned in the depths of your inbox,
Until you scroll and scroll to find that unread email you've missed,
and you stumble into the disjointed parts of a life
that once used to be yours.

I think there's been a me in every household.
every friend group.
every family.

Yet I've never once met someone who knew how it feels,
To look in the mirror at something you want to burn off your skin.
To stare for hours at your face, trying to find an inkling of yourself
hidden away beneath the revolting skin, and then trying to gauge
whether people can see the desperation in your eyes as easily as you do.
To cower in photos, or pull funny faces, because you know
that no matter how hard you try, you'll never like what's staring back at you
from the mirror.

I've always been a person who is seen best through others' eyes.

I feel like a parody of myself,
whenever I see myself on video.
like a cartoon in a semi-real existence
pulling antics for an audience that has long since stopped watching.
Subliminally begging them to like me.
Begging them to keep watching.

I feel like I'm a cynic in my bones,
while my blood longs for laughter and sunsets
and my heart begs me to hold on to the dredges of sympathy
its painstakingly collected over the years.
And my brain, oh, my brain
it keeled over from madness far before I ever did,
buried in the pamphlets of personalities I adopted
still searching for the one that fits like skin.

Skin.
Whose skin am I wearing?
Are those sun-speckled arms mine?
Is my body mine to command?
Is the creature in the mirror me?
Or is it just the constant for the variables
that constitute my personality?

I carry pieces of everyone I've ever known.
My opinions are the equivalent of a parrot
screaming from the rooftops
about what it overheard in philosophy,
hoping that somebody will give it a cracker
and an enclosure in the museum,
so it doesn't fizzle out of memory.

I'm a folksong that nobody quite knows the words to,
so they make up their own.
There's as much to me as they assign.
Nothing more, nothing less.

As I said, I'm best seen through others' eyes.

They see the parts of me I don't like to see in myself.
The parts that prove I am more than the creature in the mirror.
They see the joy in my eyes when I'm with children.
They see my wonder on nostalgic summer afternoons.
They see the happiness I hide from myself.

I am the eyes that see me.
I am the people I surround myself with.

I am the sum-average of everybody I've ever met.
a paradox of identities, a folk song sung in parts.
graffiti scrawled on the graphite, unfinished, fading
yet still irrevocably mine.

me. myself. I.