June 17, 2020
“Who asked you?” I jeered at the beginning of this whole process, to which you responded, Who invoked me?
You did.
I did. I did it consciously, intentionally, with foresight and reckless disregard of whether it was a good idea or not.
And yet as Rax mentioned — as I mentioned to them — I am not necessarily on the plural spectrum myself. I am Madison, and you are my ally. You are a literary device based on a deliberate misreading of a literary device. You are a deliberate effort. You are artificial. A construct.
Am I?
And now we come to those strangely-shaped thoughts. Are you, though?
Are you a literary device to be wielded, heavy handed or not, in the service of a writing project? Are you a metaphor that I let get out of control?
Or are you me? Are you me talking to myself? Are you me thinking out loud? Are you me processing grief, processing trauma, figuring out how to experience joy?
Are you me?
Am I?
Are you a synthesis of the two? Are you some combination of metaphor and self? Are you a portion of me, some ill-defined segment walled off or set just offstage and given voice?
Are you then still me, or are you something else? Something other? Are you like depressed Madison, someone I can sit and watch, however metaphorically, act, however metaphorically? Are you speaking in my voice? My true voice? If I am me and you are, as I say, the shape of my hands displaced half an inch behind my own, navy blue and trimmed with sea-foam green, are you then in some sense not me? If, when you speak I find myself tasting blood, is that not a sign?
Am I?
Matthew is dead and that, in a way, makes him another person. I was…something in those intercalary years before Madison; I existed, of a certainty. Perhaps, as I’ve said, I am going through another death, too. Perhaps that part of me that started this process has already died.
To start a project is to kill a portion of yourself, I wrote, and perhaps I had a hand in my own demise twice over now. Many, many times over, for have I not started many, many projects?
I will accept plurality in serial. I am a different me than ever I was before.
But are you me? Does plurality in parallel apply here?
Are you me?