“O seasons, o castles,
What soul is without flaws.”
Arthur Rimbaud
So often I was on the verge of becoming someone else,
a counter-self shedding the slow accretion
of the self I had become.
Could I transform myself into a character
and my life into a story forever?
I had neither the skill nor resources
to manage a sustainable parallel fiction,
to support a second self.
I could not afford the who I wanted to be.
Unwilling to put my life in jeopardy,
I settled for being many versions of me
but not all at once and not all the time.
In the flaws and fractures of my persona
another me seeped daily into life,
a thief leaving more than what was taken,
a disease gradually improving my health.
The fact is I am fiction,
a fiction made of facts.
2014