Inhabited

I have become inhabited; I live where I am, in this aging frame whose defects and furnishings have become first nature to me. The way I move, unconsciously adapting each moment to the biases of unbalanced muscle and bone, this is habitual, this is natural.

The scientists tell us that this is not true at the beginning in some ways. When you are newly birthed, the frame is developing, its control and sensory systems adapting to the world around it. The physics of the eye is such that light enters and is refracted into an inverted image by the lens — babies see everything upside down, and that is why they seem so uncoordinated and fall over a lot. And then the brain restructures to match the tactile environment, and we forget ever having seen things the other way.

It is the same with many other things — we begin with simple loves, of quiet, or of food, or human voices; we are acclimatized by other influences, acclimatized to other things or people, and develop more complex loves. Perhaps among us, at any time or in any place, are those with the rare ability to turn this complexity into words, or wine, or paint, or clay, or dance; then art is made.

I am in habit, and each moment I segue towards new ones. I am a multitude, although not a legion. I am a swarm of mes, each me shading imperceptibly through time and space to another me. I am a storm of selves, layer upon layer stacked until I am unsure if one is (I am) many selves, or many shelves.

Some day, I who write this will be gone and replaced entirely. I know this is true, because the person who wrote the first posts in this blog is not the person who writes this. And yet by legal fiat, they are one and the same.