Who Am I, Really?

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Who Am I, Really?

There is a stranger
living beneath my name.

I hear them breathing
when the house is asleep,
when the moon presses its pale face
against my window
like an old friend come to mourn.

Everyone says they know me.

They speak of me
as though I am a place
they have visited before

a familiar road,
a favorite room,
a well-read book.

But I have searched every corridor
of my own soul
and found only locked doors.

I am stitched together
from expectations,
from old wounds,
from things I pretended to love
so someone would stay.

And now,
when I pull at the threads,
I do not know
if I am unraveling
or becoming.

The church bells ring somewhere distant.
The crows gather on telephone wires.
The evening drapes itself
over the world like funeral lace.

Everything seems to know
what it is.

The rivers do not question
their direction.

The stars do not ask
why they burn.

Even the dead
rest faithfully in their graves.

Only I remain awake,
digging through the earth of myself
with bloodied hands,
searching for a truth
that may never have existed.

Perhaps there is no hidden self
waiting beneath the masks.

Perhaps I am the masks.

The laughter.
The grief.
The rage.
The tenderness.

The monster in the dark.
The child afraid of it.

Perhaps I am every version
that ever fought for survival,
every ghost that ever wore my face.

And if that is true
if there is no sacred answer
buried beneath my skin
then maybe the tragedy
is not that I do not know who I am.

Maybe the tragedy
is how long I believed
I had to become one thing.

Tonight,
the moon asks its question
through the glass.

Who are you?

And for the first time,
I do not answer.

I simply sit beside the darkness
and let it know my name.