Misshapen Identity in Always Recovering, Never Recovered.

Shaking palms pressed to steamed-mirror mists, trying to trace the outlines of an echo; trying to feign acceptance of this body I don’t know.

The reflected form of a foreigner, reminiscent but different; all the contours confused and completion deferred, the lines no longer lucid, the edges all blurred. Your linear rules and perfect verse, dismissed, dismantled and dispersed; I’m in a new role, unrehearsed. I don’t know how to be this version, this new and unfamiliar person.

My world distorted and inverted, all my truths upturned, perverted; you have been, through everything, the scaffolding to which I cling, and the scaffold from which I hang. Without your foundations I’m question-mark quicksand; unsecured, insecure and unsure.

You made me in your image, whittled away by your ruinous whispers, hollowed out in your honour; your face stapled over the blank unformed scarscape of mine. Now, inch by inch in slow degrees, reality is stealing me and almost imperceptibly, I’m becoming a solidity, a weighted earthen entity. This foetus-faced facsimile, this vague familiarity; she doesn’t look or feel like me, I’m losing my identity, because half of me is you.

The empty husks of the only self I recognise, the weightless one with you inside, drift distant on the winds; just spherical puffs of dandelion-fluff, fractal-floss flotsam floating free, embers of a fading fire. My fingers itch to catch them, trap them, cup palms and clap them, snare them like fireflies; keep them close. Pull off their little lacework wings and swallow their tiny gaslight bodies like morphine pills; keep you inside me, keep us safe. You were the beginning and end of my world, everything was about you; despite myself I’m terrified, I don’t know who I am without you.

Is it truly possible, given time, to rebuild, regroup and redefine; to ride this shifting paradigm, and accept this foreign face as mine?