I don’t know who I am anymore.

The realisation doesn’t hit me very hard at first, by which I mean it doesn’t come as much of a surprise.  I’ve always known, I suppose.  Even as a kid, I was usually someone different to each person I talked to—people always saw in me whatever it was they wanted to see, and I let them, knowing that I would always still be myself regardless.

Except now I don’t know who that is.

Maybe it’s just me collapsing in on myself—all the years of therapy and unwanted attention, all the drugs.  Twenty-nine years of carefully erecting a delicate web of personalities and alter-egos to protect myself from all that.  Twenty-nine dirty little years of acting whatever part I was imagined in.

And now I can’t even recognise myself in a mirror.

Still, I can’t say that given the choice, I would go back to how things were.  Life is more exciting, to an extent, this way.  It hurts sometimes, I suppose, to see the looks of concern on the faces of the people who knew me.  I don’t blame them really.  I’m a pale, hollowed shell of the me they knew—a gaunt, emaciated study in black and white excepting the violent red shock of my hair and the unsettling incongruity in my eyes.

A silhouette lies stationary on the dingy grey of the hotel wall…I can’t swear to you whether or not it’s mine.

Sometimes I watch myself in the little mirror lying on my desk to try and see what everyone else does when they look at me, but it never does much good.  The old mirror is scuffed and scratched from use, and my reflection mocks me with eyes sharp as a hawk’s and twice as predatory.

Sniffling, I turn away from the stranger with my face—I don’t know him.

Tonight I don’t think I’ll put much thought to it.  I’ll just sit there on the garishly decorated bed in my rented room, staring down at the floor until my smile cracks and falls shattered to the filthy carpet, soaked with bitter tears that shine almost white in the lamplight.  Almost as white as the tiny crystals that collect in the scratches on the old mirror—cracks so fine that they almost resemble the thinly etched lines on my cuticles or the hypersensitive skin of my palms.  Maybe I’ll take something to help my mood—shouldn’t matter though.  You could say I’m not really real.

And I don’t even know who I am anymore.