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I don't know who I am. The person inside of my head is completely different from the one living this life. The fingers typing this nonsense aren't my own, they belong to the imposter. The name everyone knows me by. The Shell. God I hate her. She's the reason I'm trapped. I live below the surface, closer or farther depending on the instance, but always just a bit removed. Sometimes I'm tantalizingly close, able to feel the breeze and the touch of those around me, so close yet so far. I hate it. On the other hand is when I'm so far I can't even remember the name associated with my prison (and by extension, myself). Everything I know or think I might know feels so alien, and it might as well be a million miles away. I don't know which is worse, though in the times I'm close at least I can connect. But these glimpses are so fleeting, they may as well be a flash of lightning at night. Lighting up my dark world for mere seconds, before disappearing and leaving carnage in its wake. Perhaps this is why I'm unable to love. Because I only meet them when She lets me have control. Stolen greetings. Stolen moments. I read somewhere that life is measured in moments, not in minutes. By this logic, I've barely lived at all, and if the life I've lived is made from stolen moments, does that make it a stolen life? Regardless of philosophical what-ifs never to be answered, if I was truly to be free, for all to be right in this body and mind that may be mine (at least in part), one of us must die. The Shell or I. When I am close, all I want is for whatever is holding me back from MY life to be no more, by whatever means. If The Shell is the one mentioned above, then I suppose I wish death on her. When I am far, isolated in my own personal hell, all I want is death for myself. In these moments, I still consider the body I am trapped in to be a punishment, but I no longer wish for escape to the earthly side. Instead, I wish to be pulled out the other end. Would it even be death if I don't exist in the mind of anyone but myself? Am I obsolete? Would I go to heaven or to hell, if such places do exist? I've barely lived, never had time to be a sinner or a saint. Would I be judged the same as babies dead in womb or birth? Would my existence be simply erased? Would The Shell keep living, none the wiser of my existence, or lack thereof? Would she feel an emptiness, even without being fully aware of my presence? Is she aware of me even now? Is she trying to get me out? Is she trying to keep me in? Is she in the same position as I am right now, is she far when I'm close, am I the villain of her story? Is she even a she? Is she the one who inherited the name of our body, or is she nameless like I am? If we are in the same boat, who's the one rocking it? Could it be me? Perhaps there's more than just the two of us, maybe there's millions. Perhaps the storm outside is the one rocking us. Is she jailer, cell mate, or the jail itself? Can the jail be held responsible for the acts of the jailer? Is a jail truly a jail, or simply a bogeyman mirage cast over a building by the jailer to make those inside feel small? Does the jail understand its purpose, the atrocities inflicted within its walls? Does it feel shame? Sympathy? Grief? As the years go by and the causalities pass to insurmountable heights while it grasps the reality of the human condition which afflicts the jailer, does it grow indifferent, apathetic, numb, did it ever care at all?! Does it hate the jailer as the prisoner does, knowing its sole use as a tool, an alibi? Is it caged in a prison of its own? Is it oblivious to its role in such suffering, the snuffing out of so many souls? How would it feel finding out for the first time? Horrified? Disgusted? Would it even care at all?
Then again, there is always the all-too-probable scenario that a jail is just that which most know it as, a building meant to house the scum of earth made of nothing more than metal and bricks, a complete lack of conscience desolating its frame? Perhaps my own jail drives me past the outer reaches of reality and lends me sympathy to misguidedly spare on inanimate material.
Is The Shell the fiction my peers erase me with, or is she an illusion my mind creates and displays before my senses as it is smothered in the death throes of my sanity? Perhaps we are one and the same, such as two sides of a coin? Or maybe I’m simply seeing double as I look upon my life, drawing a line of symmetry where it ought not to exist? And if this is so, can this condition of the sight be found in the eyes, or is it deeper, residing in the mind? Could it be fixed with glasses or a different point of view; or are my options to drill the inner recesses of my mind and take out that which does not belong while running the risk of killing something crucial, or to simply live with the condition?
A great many unknowns, with few answers in sight, taunt me as they dance in the corners of my eyes, fluttering away in my attempts to examine them…