The Self That Was a Stranger
他人であった自己
In a drawer I had not opened for years I found a bundle of my own old letters.
The handwriting was unmistakably mine, yet the hand that had shaped it belonged to a stranger.
A young man of twenty had written them, and certain, in an ink now faded to brown.
I read his confident sentences with the unease of a spy intercepting a rival's private correspondence.
He believed things I no longer believe; he wanted a future I have since refused and outlived.
Between his convictions and mine lies a that no mere passage of years could wholly explain.
We share a name, a birthplace, a scattering of scars, and almost nothing else that truly matters.
Am I this young man grown older, or merely his distant , living in the house he left?
The law would call us one continuous person, bound by a single thread of unbroken memory.
But the thread has frayed and been re-spun so often that its original fibre can scarcely be found.
Each self I have been wrote over the last, the way a scribe reuses a costly, half-scraped parchment.
I am a , and beneath today's script lie a hundred earlier texts, blurred but never quite erased.
The boy peers up through my present handwriting like a drowned face beneath the surface of a pond.
I feel neither pride nor shame at his letters, only the of an almost total .
To claim him fully would be a lie; to him entirely would be a subtler, colder lie.
He is not me, and yet without him I would not be the particular no-one that I am.
Identity, I begin to suspect, is less a substance than a story we keep agreeing to tell.
We stitch our scattered selves into a single figure and call the seam , and then we forget the stitching.
The story is not false, exactly, but it is composed, edited, and quietly revised with every retelling.
Memory supplies the illusion of a single author, though the manuscript has clearly passed through many hands.
I looked for the boy in the letters, but I found only the distance between his voice and mine.
And that distance, strangely, is the truest thing the yellowed pages had to offer me tonight.
For to measure how far one has travelled, one needs the abandoned starting point still marked on the map.
The stranger who wrote these lines gave me, unknowingly, the against which to read my life.
I shall keep his letters, not as relics of who I was, but as maps of how far I have wandered.
Perhaps in twenty years another stranger will open this very page and fail to recognise my hand.
He too will feel the , and in feeling it will prove that I, tonight, was truly alive.
So I write on, addressing a future stranger who will wear my name and doubt he ever was me.