I’ll tell you what: I have been having a weird week. I have, in all ways, forgotten my name. The way it attaches to my face in the mirror, the way it sounds pressed against my neck, the way it tastes rolling off a lover’s tongue. I can sequentially assemble the phonemes that (I’m told) form the semantics of my label, but you see, I’ve forgotten how to shape it against my alveolar ridge and let it drop through my teeth to bounce across the air with the musical lilt I like to think accompanies my utterances. My ears no longer register the frequencies needed to translate meaning into the pattern of comprehension that would allow anyone to address me directly by name. My eyes lose focus and fill in optical illusions where the graphemes of me would be.

But I suppose, in this, there is a culmination. Perhaps I was stripping away the layers of paint that held my skin in place. Rotted wooden frame where bone should have held the etchings of a person. A life. Events and activities. Passivities and beliefs. The usual senseless sensations that coil around joints and pretend to be memory. The trippings of the throat that pretend to be utterly thinkable, unutterable thoughts. They cling like shiny new scars inside my elbow.

The body still exists, of course. Cannot, in any way, stop interpreting, misinterpreting, misleading, impeding. Freeing. The nameless step of a size-seven shoe. All symbolic all the way down. From toe to heel and back again. The slip on snow-over-ice of a moniker melting into slush and freezing overnight. Re-shaping and creating every sun-stroked morning.

Wherever it was, it caught my meaning. And there I doubled back into origami folds. Until I was this paper me bent into unnatural shapes that never mean exactly what you tell them to.