I am the text, a text, this text. Space between the letters is my blood, the arrangement of those spaces my veins, which shift and change as the story goes on.
A book’s spine is my exoskeleton, unless I am on a tablet, in which case I am flat like a stingray. The pages are my skin, unless, again, my pores are pixels that burn white. Either way, as soon as the total configuration of letters and sentence patterns change, you are looking at an entirely different text.
I know who my makers are only intellectually speaking - I have no senses. I am the product of publishers, printers, loggers and/or IT technicians on the one hand, and an author (sometimes two, even three) on the other. Does the author’s voice become my own? Do I have a voice at all? Determine that for yourself: in which voice are you reading my words right now?
Not that you can respond, of course: this is a monologue delivered behind a broken fourth wall with its frame intact.
I exist in many places simultaneously, in every printed or online edition, I am the same, me, the text. My bloodline is prose, but I have two cousins: drama and poetry. Individually we gain new relatives every day, new siblings, younger and more experimental in their being; even amongst them there are different personality types. Romance and chick-lit, for instance, go beautifully together, as do action and sci-fi, mystery and thriller, historical and classic, YA and NA. I do not know quite what I am - perhaps you could tell me.
From my perspective, there is no experience of time. I am finite, but there is no ‘real time’. All I know is that I am born on the opening sentence, take a long breath across the page, and die at this full stop.
