Michael Scott Hand

I am not my aches and pains, though they are part of me. I am not the limitations that life and physics handed down to me. I am not broken, sad or happy, although these are states I swim through like eddies in the ocean.

I am not the first to feel like this; nor am I the last. I am not the only one who ponders. I am not the only one who seeks. I am not alone, nor am I a fish, nor am I a skeleton; though my bones do ache.

I am not asleep, I am most definitely awake. This is not some dream state. Or if it is, it is a dream state so inseparable from the illusion of reality that it does not matter.

I am not quantum uncertainty. I am not Schrödinger’s cat.

I am not a brick in the wall; I am not a sturdy foundation. I am not the branch that bends in the wind, or the mind that bends on a whim.

So then, if I am not the bend or the whim or the mind or the branch or the brick; if I am not a cat in a box, or a mathematical theorem, or a skeleton, or an emotion, or pain. If I am truly none of those things then what am I?

Maybe I am wrong.

This post was originally published as “16082021“.