Ghosts of Me

Every imagined detail of my life that could've been haunts me. The girl I should've been follows me from room to room. Won't leave me alone. I try to hide inside today but she always seems to find me.

What if 1,000,000,000 miles away from here there is another me? What if she dreams at night about all the mistakes I've made the day before?  She lives a day behind me, she lives in a better version of my life. She buys time with hours of sleep. She has moments of composure that I've never been able to conjure. I'm jealous of her, but I think I just created her.

Or has she created me?

The vastness of my empty gut fills with breath and the permanency of my failures wraps its cold skeletal fingers around my throat. Am I still breathing?

Do I live in a locked psych ward? Are the grades that I compulsively check online just letters I've written on the walls inside? Are my greatest accomplishments delusions of grandeur? Does my family congratulate my demented scrawls? Do they clap their hands for imagined success? Do they even have hands? Does anybody?

What if all of my mistakes were just nightmares of the womb and I haven't quite started living yet. My mother does drink a lot of orange juice (I've heard that makes for crazy dreams).

Maybe the pills that I take are just capsules full of fabricated experience. One is imprinted with a T and the other an R. I never, until now, considered it but maybe I'm Tabula Rasa and they feed me my life. Maybe that's why I've never gotten any happier like they always said I would. Did they even say that?

I wonder if I live in a deluge of fantasy. Is everything I know just my own creation? Can anyone hear me? I am screaming, I think.

I think sometimes that I want these answers but the truth is: I've never handled the truth very well. At least I think that's true.

Whenever she comes swinging at me I don't even bother putting up my hands. I think the blows will help me feel alive. The bruises will be as imagined as the person who delivers them. I am not afraid of my own creation. Famous last words?

What if the schizophrenic in a padded room is seeing reality and we're all just walking in ether. What if I'm the schizophrenic in the padded room? What if my fantastical dreams are just glimpses of reality that I see when I am lucid?

What if time is really not moving, everything ground to a halt in the instant that I lost you and I've just been waiting in that moment for the clock to move again? Am I in a coma? Have I even lost you?

Did you lose me? Am I watching from the after life? Is it hell to watch yourself fail from a too far to stop it? Is this delusion my lake of fire? Am I paying for my sins?

Is this purgatory, or illness, or life, or death? Have I even been born yet? Am I new? Am I right? Am I sorry?

She haunts me. She asks me these immutable questions and greets my replies with unqualified derision.

I'll always have new answers,
I guess that's what it means to be alive.