What’s My Self?

What is this pervasiveness? 

What is this system of patterns
These loops both logical and non?

It’s the adult-praised sort of childhood
So reliable and honest
(After all, rules are rules)
Discovering the joys of the written word
Its true native language, a blessing at age four
Writing tiny lines of a story 
Under shaky drawings
Then a ride home that always felt a little too long
Seeking patterns in license plates or rooftops
Depending on the view that day  

Slightly older, it quickly becomes
Books instead of silly games
Characters it imagines it understands better
Hiding in the library sometimes when the bell rings

It’s maturing into an adulthood
Looked down on as childish
Loving the adorable and the strange
While giggling in the third person
Knowing it’s not quite right in the head
Learning how to hold animals
Learning how to drive
Confused by finances
Struggling to thoroughly grasp the intricacies beyond numbers on a screen 
Paying bills always on time but spending the rest
The concept of retirement being a strange mystery:  
Why would you assume such a strange thing to live so long?

It’s tapping, squeezing, fidgeting
Spinning, hitting, hurting
Blinking and blinking and blinking
Needing to pacify
Needing to feel
Terrified to feel

It’s needing to follow
Hating to lead
Never still

It’s isolation 

It’s wanting to tell you everything
When it’s trapped in vehement silence
Assaulting hope with vicious abandon
Then hiding behind the mask of carefully chosen words
Recovered and sensible enough to know better than to run untethered

It’s following a road map
Looking for the most valuable thing
With no GPS to catch your wrong turns
But when you ask for directions
No one can understand where you want to go
And your compass has no needle 

It’s wanting to help
But learning not to offer
Lest it offend
It’s needing to be helped
But afraid to ask
Lest it be known and judged 

It’s missing opportunities
Breaking connections
Destroying friendships 

It wants to disappear 

It’s calm in the face of disaster
Disaster in the face of others
Half-blind with fear of the regular
Unmoved by doom 

It’s breaking connections 

It’s a single song looping
Long enough to scratch that itch
On max volume to drown out the world
And touch something unknown inside 

It wants to connect 

Conflicted daily
It needs to be seen / hidden
It wants to live / die

It’s screaming in a self-imposed deafness 

It’s silence under the roaring waterfall of the world

It loves the soothing scents:
Vanilla like warm rain
Chocolate like a winter fire
Fruit like a summer day
Or trees like home 

It loves the soothing earth rhythms 
The strings, the deep bass
And the frequencies felt more than heard 

It seeks the quiet
Dark and soft places, things
To complete the cycle
To return to ok

It needs patterns
Rhythm, repetition
To know what comes next

It needs to connect 

It’s intuition unlike yours
Missing your obvious
But sometimes taking you by surprise
When it catches what you miss

It accepts the firm pressure 
In just the right places  
From one loving it without words

It’s trying to tell me so many things
But being both separate and a part of it
I can’t connect the dots 
It wants to tell you so many things  
But you don’t understand the language either

It is me and it’s of me    

Can’t you see
It’s just trying to connect 

Desperately, even though
It’s finally starting to understand
That they can never be found
It’s searching for those missing parts
With no shape or colour to key on 

How can it find
What has no scent, or voice, or flavour

How can it find
What’s not in any book
What it can’t name or touch I don’t know
But I’m struggling under the weight of accepting
That it’ll never find the answer 
Even as it foolishly chooses 
Every day to continue offering
What nobody seems to want in exchange

.

April 25 – June 2, 2025