A Somnambulist Unlike You

Forgive me if I play this badly...

Others were born to act, I act because I was born. A tragedy of reflexes. Nothing comes natural to me; not love, not anger, not even the sharpness of sorrow. Every smile is rehearsed, every tear takes direction. Even my silences audition for meaning. To feel is to fake. To fake is to survive. And what is survival but a long, dutiful impersonation of a being who belongs?

I have no lapse in virtue because I am not virtuous. I am not noble. I am not wicked. I am not anything but mimicry. I have no place in vice because I lack invention, I only plagiarize your sins. I perform them like a script written in your saliva, your semen, your grief. I was not gifted the original sin. I inherited the reruns.

In vitro, before the umbilical leash dragged me into the dirt-drenched theatre of the living, my soul wandered aimlessly, disoriented. A moth without a flame, haunting the margins of materiality, slipping through atoms like rumors. And when at last I was poured into this flesh-vessel—this Babel of bones and contradictions—I became a phantom tenant. A guest locked inside a house where I recognize nothing.

This should be a body, but it is a bunker of bones. A borrowed baritone from Beelzebub, echoing in the cathedral of collapse. My form is a camouflage of carbon and complaint. My blood is borrowed ink. My breath is a sigh stolen from some ancient, weeping god. I disperse like the fart of a ghost. Humorous, tragic, forgotten before it registers. My entropy will be soundless, but I promise it will stink.

And what becomes of this fading? The worms feast. The dirt drinks. From this carcass of contradictions, something sprouts; slow, somnambulant, and sick with stolen light. Life again, birthed from what I could not bear to become. An earthbound resurrection of detritus. The triangle of nothing; birth, death, and the farce I performed in between.

Clouds clap like cymbals at my charade. Thunder is just applause from the gods for another act well endured. My claws scrape the chalkboard of heaven, leaving notes for the children of learning. I do more than teaching. I haunt. I reappear in lessons I never lived, in myths I never made. In a sperm, I was potential. In a coffin, I become metaphor.

Nihilism nods to me not as a brother, but as a mirror. We share no creed, only conclusions.

Others were born. I was described meticulously, morbidly, like a criminal profile drafted by the divine. Then I was circumscribed, placed within parameters, drawn in chalk like a corpse on the street of existence. Not because I had died, but because they feared what I might become if uncontained.

I was carved out of the belly of the earth, not kissed into life like you. You were born free, I was manufactured. Fabricated like a weapon. Tempered like steel. Every scar is a solder. Every laugh is a leak. My mother did not hold a baby. She held a burden. A heat that hadn’t cooled yet.

I knew what chains were before I tasted breast milk. I knew bondage before love, burdens before lullabies. Some of you cry because the world wounded you. I cry because I was born already bandaged, and no one could tell where the wound ended and the boy began.

And yet I live. Out of endured hopelessness. Out of inertia. Out of habit. Out of the sick curiosity that maybe this performance will shift into reality. That the pretense will one day forget it’s a lie and become something true. I will remain in the forge till then. An actor without a script. A soul without syntax. A thing that moves like man but means like myth.

Forgive me if I play this badly. I never asked for the role. I was just born with the mask stitched to my skin.