esther; d6; fin

I think somewhere along the way I lost that certain something that sets one person apart from the next.

My father would try to put a date to when I snapped— he functioned that way, with a need for significant hours and minutes and days that passed with remembrance only to be forgotten. He kept his days in line with militancy, reminding himself that all things pass and that those that have have brought about the present and would affect the future.

His reasoning was a noose that tightened around my pale neck each time he asked me when.

(“Esther, there had to be a day when you began to feel— I don’t know— different?”)

He never wanted to say insane, but I knew that the concept lingered at the back of his mind like a loaded gun—god, what would he do with a daughter that had fallen so far off the brink of insanity that even a planned rescue could not bring her back.

“The moment where things changed simply never existed.”

But we both knew this to be a lie, because he would be a martyr for times arranged and I would be the ever-shifting ground beneath the shaken foundation of his faith— maybe then we would both find stability among the chaos and call it religion.

I knew there wasn’t a god, anyway.

But on certain days I would suppose that there could be no harm in prayer, and those were the days that personas were innocent, sometimes church girls and sometimes moral and sometimes upright but never honest.

When you scrawled a new name upon your skin every time the sun rose, you came to realize that you being truthful became the one thing that remained just out of reach.

But it didn’t matter much, then, because I everything else in the spectrum of human possibility became tangible— I could be the daughter of a dead poet or a poet myself; I could have traveled the world thrice over by the age of eighteen or remained locked behind the same white wall for the entirety of my existence.

And maybe none of it was true enough to saturate my mind, but my heart believed it and sometimes so did I.

(“Are you Esther today?”)

Still today; still a timely manner attached to every nuance of my existence.

(“Have I ever been anything but?”)

But he knew that I had been different, that I had been introducing myself to false names drawn from the back of my throat like a false truth I could not swallow, that when I stared into the mirror I stood there for five minutes and counting, memorizing the details of my own features so that I would not forget them when the sun fell and my identity collapsed with it.

God, how difficult it became to recognize myself after attempting to forget the same for so long. There were days when I could not, when I would stand at the mirror for hours and sob because what lay behind the glass was so unrecognizable I could not put my own name to its features. Those nights were the epitome of fear, because those nights meant that I laid in bed with an impure body I was not able to wipe clean of a day’s worth of false honesty.

Those were the nights I recognized myself as a walking falsity, and only during those hours did I long for the truth.

But I’ll be damned if I ever found it, for I prayed to that nonexistent god and I prayed to my father and I prayed to a mother that had been long gone before I knew what it meant to pray with venom on the tip of my tongue. Somehow, when I prayed I could pretend that the slate had been wiped clean, that I had been forgiven, that the next morning I could take on a new name and not be held accountable for anything that had occurred in the twenty-four hours that went before.

(“Who are you today, Esther?”)

I turned the question over in my mind, simply another passing of time that my father attributed to my crumbling sanity—at least he was attempting to make linear sense of something that I saw as unconnected points on a map that showed the expanse of nothing in particular.

“I suppose I’m nobody in particular.”

Sometimes I would speak the sentence to his face, with the dawn of morning shading the side of our faces like a blinding that attempted to protect us from being blinded by a truth we could not handle. In this house of false and faces and twisted tongues, you took whatever form of protection you could find.

But sometimes, I whispered that phrase when I froze in front of the mirror, or when I laid in the dark for hours on end turning over the possibilities tomorrow would bring in the form of new identities.

Sometimes, I the phrase fell from my tongue so many times that I could find it as the only truth that existed in the world that spun around my head at speeds to which I could not keep pace.

When you stopped trying to make sense of a world that never looked past the surface of false identities and empty voices, you found the simplicity that lied under a history of deceit and masks of a different kind. Nobody who had truly been remembered had ever stayed the same for longer than a day— I suppose that is why my father marked the lapse of time like a futile attempt to change the history of how he lost all that he held dear—a wife, and now a daughter to the tongue of illness and insanity.

He asks again, “Who are you today?”

I ponder the question still, staring directly at the sun through the window as it broke the horizon like a muddled piece of glass suddenly clarified, “Today, I am somebody.”

Who, I do not know.