You could name the blood - they're all in here; granddads and grandmothers, brothers and sisters I've never had, people we've never met, lovers I've become, lovers who have faded into me - the entire world in one drop of blood of mine.
I have become an unbreakable sequence of several, unrelated, endlessly-streaming series - ruthlessly re-creating my image at every series' end that I'm in denial of who I originally was or who I could actually be. I no longer recognise myself.
In the mirror I see the face of a supporting actress with the fluttering pulse of ambition in her heart to be someone. Sometimes I'm a cameraman with no name who just got fired. A few times I've seen major characters in my mirror - holding up large facades of grandeur or blowing a lethal glares from the pit of their eyes.
I was never originally like this. I think this phenomenon took place when I was eight or seven, and I've never been myself since then. You see, we all tried. Sometimes without sleep. Everybody in my life took their share of it if I had to be fair - even my parents who sometimes didn't know how to help, and my crushes who never knew how to approach with a hand. Everyone wanted to help regardless of how they eventually just gave up and left.
I mean, you're looking for a filthy bag of porridge packed in a skull that secretly unplugs and goes places and could be anywhere - down a road or on a plane to Mumbai. This brain knows more hiding places than you think a brain could process. And it's my brain.
I've become attached to other brains. I was never Lisbeth Slander twice. It was challenging to be Sherlock Holmes because everybody hated me for being an asshole and I constantly felt like I was right about everything. I was Mikael Blomkvist for a while, then I moved to being Paul Kemp, but when the festering sadness fuelled my veins and made them rupture, I immediately held up a strike and became William Burroughs. I could have never become Allen Ginsberg - I'm neither a naturally hopeless romantic nor as tempting as a Jewish gay man. The politics got to my head and I had to run away when the drugs filled the shoes of an ultimate accolade. Recently I had a brief episode of Nat Dickstein. It was fulfilling. I felt like a true vulnerable-and-massive-within- the-right-measures rockstar - if only he wasn't a Mossad agent who'd stolen plutonium for Israel...
I have managed to keep it to a minimum of two characters if no other individuals intrude the filming location. There is always Matty Healy to be with Timothy on his side. Then I have to die for a while when it gets too overwhelming. I melt into the mud that I have chosen to cover my grave because I don't have the arms of a man to dig my own hole. I am an earth sign and death comforts me - so we have an embrace as the pouring rain batters the petrichor out of terrain and there is nothing else that matters. I stay there until a new character pulls me out and changes my face and clothes and sends me with a new identity to a new house in a new country.
Reality is a heavy burden.
It doesn't accept the wild imagination of a young woman pretending to be a 45-year old man with a duodenal ulcer. Realistic people don't get it either. They don't know what it's like to be sixteen people squeezed into the same minimally overweight female body. There is enough fat and retained water to suffocate us - sometimes we do faint, all of us, and we wake up eventually one by one. It's like judgment day because the world would have been on fire while we all had been away. I can't manage without help.
There is a silent agreement that goes into execution automatically in case of need - Arthur deals with people because he scares them off and makes them shut up, Lisbeth deals with emotions we can't contain or develop, Nat seeks revenge in case we should, Sherlock orchestrates a safer new strategy to re-build our world, and David Sedaris takes care of the light bulbs that will have gone out during the strike.
They usually let me sit in the corner behind my desk with a drink and enough carbs and cigarettes to make me think I have everything under control - regardless of the fact that I have sleep-walked us into catastrophe and sprinted towards the apocalypse like a suicidal operative since the moment I saw dawn.
I don't know who's talking now - it could be Kevin with the twenty three alter egos. I can't tell. I looked in the mirror and didn't recognise the shirt I was wearing nor the hoodie. The perfume was too light and it made me puke. Sometimes I think I have to put this on hold and kick everyone out. Then I realise we should have a party - a bigger party than all the ones we've had in Sweden and London and New York, so we could invite everyone in.
Maybe you'll come.
