I.

There’s a folder on my phone I’ve stopped opening,

a shrine to a man I used to impersonate.

The faces in it drift a little further every month,

like a photograph developing in reverse—

getting less like evidence, more like a rumor.

I used to know the exact blue of my own eyes.

Now I’m some rough draft of a person

God abandoned halfway through a sentence,

and I’m the only one left to proofread the thing

II.

Two thousand twenty-one, I think, was the last time

I laughed and meant it instead of just performing the sound.

After that it’s a highlight reel of rented rooms

and receipts I file under Things That Happened To Someone,

a closet full of decisions

that made perfect sense to a man

running on gas-station coffee and the specific

philosophy you develop alone at 4 a.m.,

a philosophy that evaporates, embarrassed,

the second the sun actually shows up.

III.

I keep an album like some private, unglamorous relic—

communion wafers of a man I apparently used to be.

The one who almost finished things.

The one who almost called his mother back

before deciding his silence was more interesting.

The one who was, for exactly one summer,

a person other people actually wanted at their table,

before I quietly excused that guy from every future dinner.

I still sit up some nights doing the accounting,

counting the damage like a man reading his own eulogy

and taking notes for the rewrite.

IV.

Somebody asked me the other day what I looked like before,

and I laughed the practiced laugh,

because I genuinely couldn’t tell

if they meant my face or the entire architecture of my life.

Five years is long enough to lose a native tongue in.

Long enough that when I try to speak the old language now

it comes out mistranslated, over-formal, foreign—

some tourist-phrasebook version of myself,

still polite, still smiling,

still asking where the bathroom is

in a country I apparently used to own.

IV-B.

There’s a stranger standing in my clothes now,

doing a passable impression of my posture.

His hands hang off him like borrowed props,

heavier than mine ever were, unsure what they’re for—

an old man’s hands on an understudy who never rehearsed.

He wears my shoulders like a coat

tailored for someone with better posture and a future,

hunched up, private, superstitious, like a crow

guarding something it forgot it stole.

I don’t audition the parts of him I recognize anymore.

I just let him stand there, centerstage,

in the doorway of every photograph—

weeks, then months, then something closer to a career—

and I can’t quite bring myself to walk off either.

It isn’t that I hate the shape of him,

exactly. It’s that I can’t find the stitching,

the seam where the old me

quietly got written out of the script

and this one took over the lease

on a body he clearly never wanted,

reaching for things out of habit now,

never on purpose,

always for whatever’s closest,

whatever’s easiest to lose again.

V.

I keep waiting for a new photograph of me

that looks anything like 2016,

back when I wore my own life

like it actually fit,

like it was tailored, not borrowed,

like I hadn’t yet signed anything away.

But the calendar’s not a negotiation.

It just keeps turning,

and I’m here in clothes some other man wore out,

a bit player in a story

I apparently agreed to write

and don’t remember signing off on,

speaking a language

that used to be mine

in a voice

that used to be mine

about a man

I’m told

used to be me.