Flagellation of the Soul

Everything

I exist in undefined space.

Who will know me?

Am I a only a child, afraid and abandoned?

Am I a wife who is no longer a wife?

Everyone wants to know who they are.

This question hounds me.

Bites at my heels.

Invades my dreams and I think I know, yet this elusive knowing retreats into darkness when I wake.

I try to conjure up a new picture of myself – a new ME.

The one I want to be.

I try and puzzle it together but nothing fits.

Where is the glue that should hold me together?

I am nothing and I am everything.

I'm all I have.

There is no-one to guide me.

I drift in and out of reality.

Of the world I see around me.

I am looking in, not part of it.

Singular. Alone.

Logic tells me I am the sum of everything I have been but it doesn't add up.

I am only parts of a self.

The parts of me are acquaintances. Not close enough to be friends.

We don't know each other.

We have not walked in the same shoes.

Many lives in one lifetime.

Trying on different clothes, different attitudes, different faces.

Nothing ever lasts.

Too easily washed away by fate or the choices I've made.

When can I come home?

I grasp at the vestiges of what and who I have or could have been, yet they escape attempts to retain them.

No-one knows me.

I do not know myself.

I could be a dancer, a musician or an artist.

I could be.

But I'm made up of shards of a shattered self.

A lover, a fighter, a harbinger of peace or destruction?

I only want good but feel bad.

Everyone I've ever known has forgotten me. The versions of me I have fabricated.

They would not know me now, an undefined hotchpotch of selves I carry within this frame.

And they have changed. I no longer recognise them.

I cannot find the anchor that could ground me to this earth.

It shifts and shakes and morphs into unknown territory.

I am a foreigner in a strange land.

Every night I go to bed hoping I will wake whole.

Every morning I realise I am not.

I avoid looking in the mirror. I can't look in those eyes. There is no connection between the person looking in and the person looking back and this frightens me.