How many people live inside of us? How many versions of ourselves are waiting to be born, grow their voice, and take control of what they (and they alone) know is coming? Some of us wait and then struggle fiercely against the loss of that person we have known so intimately. For me, she dances away easily as though off to a place she’ll never come back from. I don’t mind watching her go. But others of us hold on to our skin so tightly, suffocating it, willing it to please, please stay where you are and be the same and never change.

It hurts us to become someone else, especially when who we always thought we would be is a distant memory kept alive by pure hope. We feel our skin unzipping to that slow uneasy click, click, click and we reach to hold it together. Our compulsions are too empty of meaning.