I call these types of creatures my dopey monsters. They are my many me’s – various forms of my lunacy – they live on the page as much as I allow them to. They portray how I live in my day-to-day brain, how I embody my actions, the absurdity of it all. This creature, smoking a cigarette which spells out stories as much as it does stifles my breath. It is so awkwardly both, willfully wrong as it writes. His foot is handy too – at least it is not in his mouth, which holds jagged teeth, clenched (or rather, closed?), not necessarily requiring bite, but capable of doing so if need be. He is wandering in nothing, existing within blank space, crowded by the ever-present white noise of the city. He is a shadow, yet firmly configured. His ears attentive to what could be worth listening to, his eyes existing beyond the frames of his glasses, appearing to be “abled” (well, with the additional fixer fixed to his forehead), to see like others do, on a whim he is willing to adhere to such norms, it is not forced upon him (for nothing can truly be forced upon me). Furthermore, his beanie acts as his sonar, as if lighting the runway of life. It is protruding awkwardly, a misplaced bodily addition, yet still relevant to his lived experience, but more so in relation to what others choose to see / determine of his presence. Nothing about him is necessarily “wrong”, but it certainly is not right either. He is what he is, as I am what I am (for he is me), an oddity, a sem-configured allusion of delusional nonconformity. How silly it is to exist like this, so black and white, in all the other-ish ways one can claim – this is my statement of difference within a world of boundaries to cling to – He is crazy, as I am, he is ever-so cool, uniquely what he decides to be, assigning to his existence, in every way he can find, ways to stand out through his sensorial stance, righteously dysregulated, perfectly senile, exactly how he must seem to place his face in frame realistically. How wonderful it is to be ludicrously me, one of the many me’s, such a curious calamity. How wonderful it is to aspire to consist wholly of curiosities, to stay curious, especially when told to blend in my clashes. How beautifully stupid it is to laugh at all my strangeness, to depict my fractal of faces, to showcase my daily decisions, to bravely stay free – to exist as neither human, nor fractured. To be a figment of my imagination and fascination at all that could be if only we flowed enough to follow ourselves, to always be within reach of who we are, really.