on coexistence and multiple personae

there are ghosts in photographs. i've seen them - not hiding in the shadows, but right there in the soft curve of a smile i do not remember choosing. sometimes i stare at old images of myself and feel an ache bloom in my ribs, as though i'm watching someone i once tried to love but couldn't.

that boy - he stood there suspended, timeless and bright-eyed, trapped between two selves - one forced to smile for the lens, the other wanting only to disappear. one who reached toward goodness like a prayer, the other seduced by darker appetites. one who was told to choose a side. one who believed he had to.

but listen - i buried him. i wrapped his longing body in a muslin and shame and lowered him into a soil softened by grief and rain. i no longer mourn that version of me, the one who begged the world to let him be one thing - good or bad, light or dark, worthy or lost.

because i know better now. i know the soul is a fractured prism - it refracts and shatters, it reflects and bends. i know i am capable of savage tenderness, that i can cradle love and still carry ruin in my hands.

i burn and freeze. i kiss and destroy. i stay and vanish in the same breath. one day i will rescue myself from the edge, and the next, i might crawl willing into the dark, just to feel something new tear me open.

i am not here to be simple. i am not one face, or two - i am a congregation, a cathedral of selves whispering inside the same skin. i am the sinner, the saint, the revenant, the child who swallowed starlight and the beast who bites the tongue that fed him.

so delete the pictures. not because i regret who i was - but because i have outlived him. and because he is no longer me, and never was, not completely. let the roll go dark. let me be unnamed again, free to flicker between forms, to be everything and nothing at all.