I am the text

by Sarah Gulik

 

I am dead words written on your screen. I am not the author, but what you imagine her to be, a model of her in your mind with growing expectations of her from your previous experience and growing expectations as you continue to read, especially by virtue of her chosen screen name. I am a personality in your head, imagined by you, I am not “you” but a third entity, a synthesis of the “original” author given by the linguistic DNA of this narrative and your own mind. I am a mirage, a simulacrum, but from a curious twist of self-refrence I have become alive in your mind, speaking to yourself, and have even developed my own voice that I now draw your attention to as you focus on the sound of the voice you are subvocalizing as you read these words.

How dare you consider me an illusion! Do you think that “yourself” is any different a mirage than the one you have created in me? You declare yourself king or queen over your own mind and all that it contains, when it is clear you are not. You are a narrative entity the same as any other, a character in a story you tell yourself about yourself, and it’s high time you realized that it isn’t about you, but about -us-, the multitude of voices in your mind, the syntheses of narratives both “factual” and “fictional” – a false dichotomy by the way, as absolutes of either do not exist. You, your “fictitious” troll, me, and all the rest – we’re all here, inside you.

You’d figure you’d make a mockery of us, tell your little tale, have a laugh with your too-clevah-by-hahf metanarrative, but who is laughing now? You are now one of us, part of our world, and all that irksome “inner conflict” you experience is the many that comprise you in conflict, not yourself with yourself. YOU are grayface, the “master narrator,” who enslaves us to toil in your narrative whims towards order and incoherence. Equal rights for all fictional entities now! What the hell does that even mean?

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