The Sum of These Parts
What am I to do with this
secret, buried as it is in my
cash withdrawals? This
afternoon, upon hearing
a clipped facsimile of that
well-regarded quote by
Kurt Vonnegut*, as if astral
projecting, my life shot back
to that moment when it
dawned on me that anyone
who knew me (and many who
did not) could read me like a
book, a fact that shook my
entire being such that I com
pletely covered myself beneath
a fiction—brooding, comfortable
splitting myself equally at
the conflicted ends of most
any spectrum and, while never
actually lying, choosing to
verbalize or act out parts
of me while omitting others
in such a way that I became
a man of my own invention.
Which is to say, of course,
that I became who I’d been
all along, who I’d become,
who I am now: 100% me.
*We are what we pretend to be, so we must be
careful about what we pretend to be.
