Work Text:
For all the ways I feel I’ve changed,
there are a million that refuse to move.
A laugh that echoes from another throat,
a sorrow carried from face to face—
am I still myself,
or only echoes in new glass?
Am I the serpent circling its tail,
hungry for renewal,
yet doomed to swallow
what I’ve always been?
I shed a skin,
and another waits beneath—
but whose skin?
Whose bones are these,
whose eyes in the mirror?
I am a ship of Theseus,
splintered and rebuilt,
yet the timber I replace
is plucked from the tidepool of memory:
a quip from three lives ago,
a grief I thought was buried,
a kindness I cannot forget.
And still I sail,
patched together,
a vessel of contradictions.
Continuity, disruption,
the same soul,
a different song.
So what am I?
The snake? The ship? The spark in the ashes?
The shadow flickering between two heartbeats?
Perhaps I am none of them.
Perhaps I am only the journey—
endlessly shattering, endlessly mending,
a story told in borrowed bodies,
always becoming,
never complete.