Self Talk
I search my face for you. Feature by feature, not much has changed. Has it? My face has replaced yours and you are fading away.
“I’m still here. I’ll always be here. Before you were inside, waiting. Now, I’m inside but I’m not waiting. You have arrived. And, look at you! I’m still surprised when I see you in the mirror and yet this is how you’ve always been. Who do you look like? Daddy? Papa? Tom Hanks? To me, you look like us.”
I get that.
“Remember Cynthia Sapp? In seventh grade, she was in charge of taking names when Miss Brown left homeroom to smoke in the teacher’s lounge with Miss Upchurch and Miss Jackson. Cynthia was a goody goody and a tattle tale and was always taking my name for talking when I was supposed to be studying. So, when I was passed year books at the end of the year, I signed each one in her wide forehead. It was a really mean thing to do and I still feel bad about that. I think about Cynthia sometimes as I watch your forehead grow larger as your hairline recedes and slips right off the top of your big old balding head.”
I like my big old balding head.
I’ve always felt an impulse to be seen and invisible. I still have that impulse. Even as I write this I want to disappear and then I want you to see all of me even as I hide, dodge and obfuscate. I don’t mean to. It comes naturally. I think now that I don’t want to be male or female. I want to be everything. Maybe I can be everything if I disappear. No. That’s not it exactly. I want to evaporate, spread like spores, fade into the universe. I’ll be everything.