Who Am I?

In life I’ve been accosted with a quantity of queries and questions,

some of which I resent.

 

“What’s your name?”

“How old are you?”

 “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

 

Uh, happy?

I can’t foresee whom I’ll be when I’m grown,

all my life I’ve barely known who I am presently.

I can only wait and meditate,

sit cross-legged and beg the powers that be to answer me                                

 

“Who am I?”

 

Like Jean Valjean this question has made me le miserable.

 

I once sought to study psych,

but upon being abused by AP Biology

it occurred to me that science was not my forte.

So that mistaken aspiration was the awkward foreplay

to my fabulous finding that I  l o v e  l a n g u a g e.

Some people languish in the anguish of essays and grammatical gravel.

I joyously drown in the sound of alliteration and assonance or

I’m like the toddler that skipped the teeter-totter and the swings

because the things that I adore are my building blocks,

letters and words on the playground of my blank page.

So I chose English...and Spanish.

That was my choice so my voice could venture to say

the same saying in two different ways.

¿Quién soy yo y, si encuentro a mi misma, cómo voy a saber de verdad?

Oh dear God, that all comes down to

 

“Who am I?”

 

Maybe if I stole a loaf of bread I’d found out.

 

Perhaps my lack of self-understanding derives from

the dips and dives in the effectiveness of my memory.

“Oh, hey, remember when?”

“Hey, Linds, can you recall then?”

I don’t.

Some memories won’t manage to last,

but vanish into the vast matterless abyss,

never to return to my mind.

What value hath life if it cannot be remembered,

a deceased ember,

a free falling,

fleeting thing that reaps no significance in the end?

Alas, poor Yorick.

 

My best friend from high school once nicknamed me Dory.

That’s a small story I can tell my kids someday...

if I don’t forget it.

 

Let it be known,

the moral of this internal quarrel is that

maybe I know who I’ll be tomorrow,

but just don’t remember.

This theory, however plausible, doesn’t seem wise.

And though I agonize over my identity now and beyond,

oh, how I’ve grown fond of this feeling,

this spiritual inkling that,

like the completion of a massive, mystical puzzle,

things will gradually fall into place,

that my anxiety will be rectified,

and I will find in retrospect

that everything already makes sense,

that God Almighty Himself will enlighten my future

and suture the holes in my self-understanding,

and one day

 

“Who am I?”

 

will finally have an answer. 

This poem is about: 
Me

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