I've just written this piece of sobbing self-exploratory for the core character of my Kumiko (war world #3) novel, and I think it's just a little too close to the bone of HOW I REALLY FEEL about the horror we call living. Here's the chapter: please, don't take it too literally. Even though that's what it is.
who is that stranger?
I don't feel real any more.This thing, this body, this brain, this personality, this 'me'. It doesn't feel like mine, any more.I'm a trained lab animal, a monkey without fur, a nothing entity with transferable skills that lead me to obscene conclusions about 'your world' and it's not your fault - it's all my fault for not seeing it earlier in 'my life'. I suspect I could have saved more of you from yourselves. I hope I could have been there for you, when you erupted from your chrysalis, into real-ness. Into space.I'm the everyman, the everytime, the everyday; I can be useful, helpful, compassionate, jolly, infantile, mature and sick, and insane, and not worth knowing. Or I can save you all. I can split every atom or heal any hole or wound or rupture or damage. Like a tool to fix a breakage or a pill to cure an ill. But I'll never be me.Me - you have no idea what 'me' is, do you? Think of ghosts of former selves we've never known, meshing together momentarily to satisfy either side of an equation. That's all we are, ghosts on one side of the divide looking in on the unimaginable sum.
I'll never be that class of thing that really knows itself. I'll never be self-sentient, because NONE OF US ARE. We're all constructs of our upbringing, shards of someone else's work, little fragments of a thousand broken holograms of a million former lives and cultures and influences and non-logic. Il-logic. Part of the mind-game, random conglomerations of fate. Cogs within a million machines, nothing more than not-who-we-think-we-are. Lost, in some dark place. Un-us. Un-me. Un-real.
As long as we think we're real, none of us will be saved.