I HAVE DIED FOUR TIMES

I don’t know how many more will follow.
I don’t plan such things ahead. I don’t expect them.

But each time I do, I wake right back up again.
For a while nothing may seem different. Those that surround me certainly wouldn’t notice anything different about me. To them I appear to be the same thing.
They see me as one, sequential, linear life. One person who changed over time. No one has ever acknowledged the bodies I’ve left behind.

I don’t feel like one person- I don’t feel like I’ve started in one place and walked to the other. I feel like each time I’ve grown, it was a metamorphosis comparable to that of a caterpillar. Except even the caterpillar would consider itself the same person, regardless of form.

I feel like each life I’ve led was spent tearing myself apart to find some core understanding of what I am- Killing that person in the process. Pieces of myself carefully studied by my own eyes. My body, my mind, was not mine. I was but a fly on the wall, observing it. And each time that I found something new, I could no longer live as the same person. Too much would change. Too much would be different. The history wouldn’t belong. He is not me. He is dead.

I don’t know what I am. I’ve only found comfort in understanding that I do not feel human. I do not feel like I am alive in the same way those around me are. I’m just a thing. A thing that breathes and bleeds and burns. Constantly.
The only thing that has always been consistent is that I cannot stop. Not now, not ever. I have to find an answer to end this constant cycle of death and rebirth that only I perceive.

Something that’ll let me say “This is me, this is my body, I am here and I am real.”
Even if such things don’t matter in the end.