The Many-Layered Self — A Poem

I am the flicker between lives, the hum beneath skin, the quiet electricity that remembers every face I have ever worn.

I wake as a stranger pouring coffee, hands steady, heart restless, and before the cup cools, I dissolve into someone else.

I slip into a rock star’s bones, the roar of crowds, the ache of being seen too much and not at all. Fame tastes like metal on the tongue, loneliness wrapped in velvet.

Then I am an eagle, a thought without words, a body built for sky. Wind becomes my oldest language. Hunger becomes prayer. Freedom is simply the absence of questions.

A heartbeat later, I am a soldier in a war I never chose, feeling history press its weight into the softest parts of me. Fear is a drum. Duty is a cage. I blink, and I am the one who bears the consequences.

I become the young man who would one day be my grandfather, carrying secrets like stones in his pockets, making choices that ripple outward into children he never held and children he did.

Then I am myself, the researcher, the digger of bones and names, the woman who opens the past like a locked drawer and finds herself staring back.

I shift into Marianna, into Mattie, into Ed, each mind a room with its own weather, each choice a thread tugging at the fabric of my life.

I am my grandmother as a child, watching a man at the door whose face feels like déjà vu. I am my father learning that bloodlines bend like rivers. I am my grandmother again, holding the truth in trembling hands as her granddaughter speaks it aloud.

And then I am me, older, quieter, writing stories in the glow of a screen, remembering the early internet and the strange hunger to understand death before I understood myself.

I am the echo, the ancestor, the witness, the child.

I am the field and the flicker, the question and the one who asks it.

If I were everyone, if I had lived all these lives, then who is this voice breathing through me now?