A Letter of Explanation

a poem by Corey Marks, the last sentence of which is frustratingly catched in some damned mind-hook or other even when toileting and that's why it's here now.

By now, sir, you expect a second installment. What novel is worth its ink if the hero’s ship never finishes sinking, if the cold tide never tumbles him ashore into the provincial care of two strolling shepherds? But I’m not writing to beg leniency; rather, to offer warning: For so long I thought myself irreversibly singular, but I've met another who shares features almost indistinguishable from my own and with them seeks to steal everything I call my own.

When I first saw him, he was innocuous, staring from a strategic corner in a café. He learned to read lips so he could order what I ordered. One by one, he acquired my habits the way a lexicographer compiles a dictionary, noting first the most rudimentary usages, gradually adding nuance, context, until his approximation was exhaustive.

What a performance! What unnerving self-reference. His shadow-play followed me everywhere. Once, my novel in its first flush upon the page, I – we – took a train all night through the mountains, to think, to be driven further inside my story. I spoke to him then, my double, my shadow, and he listened, attentive, all nods and approving hums. The perfect audience. Then he spoke.

Imagine, never having seen one, you find yourself before a mirror. Shock, at first. An inability to fit your mind around the clear fact of your outward self, the stranger agape before you. Soon, though, you tame a stray wisp of hair. Check your teeth, the fit of your overcoat. Imagine how others see you, what they miss. The mirror becomes indispensable, a page of reference to an aspect of yourself. It pales before what I found in him. He was the book, perfect and whole.

You see the cruelty in his disappearance. I’ve returned to the mountains, scoured trains, villages. So often I want to call his name, but what name would I call? My own? I’ve asked after him on the streets, in cafés, hotels. I’ve described him, pointing to my own face. I’ve seen the glances, shoulders turning away. I’m not blind no matter how blind the world becomes to me. You must understand my negligence, why my ambitions are all postponed, peering into the yawning waves. The amputee who still feels the ache of a missing limb knows nothing of my state. I do not feel an arm still attached, but rather that it is elsewhere, perched on a desk behind a door I’ve yet to find, clutching a pen that descends a page filled with waves of script – my script –, conducting the body’s business on its own.

I implore your patience, sir, and your caution, for we are not always who we are.