Fading light of the day dying into night. Trick of the light. The outside coming in like light being brought inside the body. Eyes register the double. Pale simulacrum, ghost, shade, spectre, reflection. "Oh, yes," that's the word. Internal monologue attempting to reign in language to an objective rendezvous. A point-of-departure. L.Z. Bug-out. Observe the see-thru lips of the self move. Is that my face? Cheeks more sunken. Eyes, shadowed and hooded. Forehead glowing as if under streetlight or moonlight or oncoming headlights. Lips working like a chew coming on, but no words emerge. Hearing no voice, as though the throat—larynx, esophagus, epiglottis, trachea—targeted as the insertion point towards hypoxiphilic hypertrophy. Language failing before ______ eyes. Phantasmic lips signing backwards symbols, spells crafted out of thick no-sound, attempting an objective conjuration. Failing. Continued attempts. A pattern of failures. Misattributed gestures and missed tics. Overemphasis. Talking the ear off. Wagging the tongue and flapping of gums. Until. Frustration shakes the body into composite parts. The sum greater than the whole. A quivering mess of flesh and tendons and veins, a glossy film of _______.

Blink.

Sharp intake of breath.

The body reconstituted. Reflection. Shadow. Projection. The self-referential strange loop. Expressions of an unknowable object. Viewed from numerous angles. Spinonymic symbiotogrammic projection. The name of God as four-dimensional object. Tesseract.

Deep quaking breath.

The terror resurfacing.

"I can't stand you."

Döppleganger. Id and Ego and Superego. Very Gemini problems of self-actualization. Dissociative or merely two-faced. Foggy mental capacities. Symptomatic for depression (clinical). C-PTSD. Am I an overly sensitive artist, have I made manifest my own pratfalls, are these injuries all self-inflicted?

Look again. Pale halflight flowing back, a reflection of a reflection, fractal comprehension. Simulacrum and waveform collapse. The cheeks appear more sunken; eyes recessed. Forehead smooth and yellowed, jaundiced ceramic. Sickly Roman statuary. Arrogant self-assuredness butting up against Fascist political theory. Some people are beyond saving, but that conversation is better left behind closed doors, in DMs and encrypted texts. Subtext and context and pretext compressed, muddied in a smear that fades farther back into this cognitive fog. Paste across the brain, filling in cracks and smoothing out the crevices of critical examination.

I spent my youth being self-critical. Now we let the collective rabble judge us accordingly. Ideological perfection requires such a constant examination of the cracks in our facades. Being sorry is no longer enough. Eyes trained on my own translucent inquisitor—afraid of what I see, see through, see past—check for any lurking danger that may be behind or inside or both. Angels of better nature and devils on shoulders both overlaid and flattened into a single layer of divine dysfunction. Become guilty so that guilt can not be assigned. Become hollow and weightless, projected against any surface, immutable and impervious but imperatively ineffectual. The invincibile kinetic shimmer of the immovable against the unstoppable.

My left hand has begun to twitch.