I'm a person, and I can't go back (2023/11/09)

To be honest, sometimes I wish I could just explode.

Not in a suicidal way, and not in an angry way, but more in a way embodying the sensation that I am too much.

I am just a sack of flesh containing a volatile fuse, a living and breathing uncomfortable mass of organs mismatched with its body, with a heart that beats in unpredictability and whose lungs swell like a balloon waiting to burst.

But it never happens, and I often wish it did. I wish I could spontaneously combust and leave nothing behind, not even organs or blood or an unrecognizable heap of flesh. Just gone.

I wish the thing living inside my body was a little tamer, a little simpler. Without having to carry the permanent weight of scar tissue from an internal bleeding that lasted for too long. Something easier to tell people, something easier to explain.

Sometimes, I try to imagine a universe where that's the case. A distant universe where this body belongs to some, tamer being, who hasn't been beaten down and down again into a pulp of internal gore. Whose insides haven't been replaced with the ravenous disarray of guts forcibly transplanted into a body that wasn't compatible.

But somehow, the thought makes me uneasy. Feels more foreign to me than anything else in my body.

Because I realize.

That I am my insides, and my insides have become a part of me.

That despite countless imaginings of alternate universes where I don't exist, I can't be anyone other than who I am. That such wishes of being someone else are nonsensical, because really, I can't imagine being without being all of this.

If you scooped out all my insides and replaced them with a fresh, untainted set, and if you transplanted in me, a new beating heart in the place of something worn out and raw, then...

Would it really be me anymore?

Would I really still exist?

(I don't want to stop existing.)

And so, a desperate monster in my heart, above anything else, pleads me to not let this body go to waste. To not easily succumb to nothingness, so that when the time comes when the insides fall to the thralls of death, it would continue to live long after the body rots.

Perhaps this way, it screams the desire to justify its own existence. To prove its own existence.

And it claws in a futile struggle to make a dent in the soil of the Earth. It claws so that its words could be heard beyond the scope of the body it occupies.

So that it simply wouldn't fade away after it dies.

And perhaps then, so that it, or I, would feel justified in saying I was a person. So then, I would deserve to be a person.

And I would feel real, and I would feel like a person.

The monsters in stories never live beyond their endings. They are birthed by the narrative for the sole purpose of being slaughtered, for their significance to be reduced to a singular sentence, mere enemies a hero have to tackle to advance their own growth.

But if I were to live beyond that single sentence, and if I mattered more than just a passing character, would I too become someone worth telling a real story about?

...

The thing is, this isn't really a "what if", though.

Not when my ink has already bled onto someone else's page.

Not when part of me already lives outside of my body, lives in someone else's heart.

So I realize that I, despite having (or being) the foreign matter of whatever wormed its way into the walls of this flesh, am already a person.

I'm a person, and even if my insides feel uglier than any impression I've ever gotten of what a "person's insides" are supposed to be like, I am still a person.

And now, nothing can or will change that.

I am a person, and I can't go back.