Daily Dose: Who am I

I've been assaulting you for a week now, but despite all I have written, I'm just a collection of sentences. Some would say you do not know me; you instead know what I have presented to you. But I don't think this is exactly correct because my personage bleeds through this electronic ink. I buzz in the words, hum along with the sentences. My experiences ooze through the text, and here in a simple clause you can find the funniest joke I've heard mixed with the worst, the first meal I ever made by myself, and a night in Amsterdam best forgot. There I am in the comma, and in the period too. In this very paragraph, you can find my life story distilled down to a time and space between words.

It’s a mouthful I know but every day, every hour, and every second, it’s true: one can look at my present portrait - the outward depiction of who I am - built up one word at a time and see an intersection of various lines that are no more distinct than a fart in the wind. I just hope I stink less and taste better.

More often, though, my smell lingers in between the naked spaces of my letters. I seem indulgent, self-serving even. I mean – look how much I’m referencing myself already. Besides isn’t writing narcissism at its highest, a conjectural statement of self-assessed worth as though whatever I am clattering away on the keyboard is deserving of being read?

I don’t think so. As far as I know, dear reader, we have never met and I am just a bundle of letters strung together on the music of a page. As far as you know, I may be an old man, and carved into my cheekbones is the happiest day of my life and in my smile weighs the saddest night. My knees shake because I have spent much of life working and my lips crack because I have lived by a factory, a factory that has coughed out fumes that have battered my hair into a sandy gray and etched canyons for wrinkles into my forehead. I have the greenest-blue-hazel eyes you have ever seen. I am a brother, a friend, a lover, a sinner, a saint, a teacher, a student, the bravest person and a coward all at the same. I move. I shake. I do, laugh, and feel. I wear hand-knitted sweaters.

Or maybe I’m a young girl stuck battling the millions of indirect battles against a patriarchy I cannot fully defeat - at least not alone. My face may be contorted into a smug look, not out of spite, but because the conflicts seem endless. I’ve given up on makeup and my hair swells atop of my head. There’s an elastic band somewhere in there; I’ve given up looking for it. There are more important things to do. There always will be more important things to do.

Or maybe I’m just Kacper: a boy pretending to be a man pretending to be a boy. Maybe I’m just a student stuck toiling around day to day, promising myself this will be the year; it’s gotta’ be the year. And maybe I just have a fitting name because more often than not, one can find me thinking about the ghost of my past and wishing I could talk to him, make him laugh and tell him everything will be alright in the end, whenever that is.

But the point is that I don't know you either, reader. Together we are unknown and that's important. All I have to show for myself is this page and all you have are my words and both of us are left with the ink-people born from its conception. What my intent was doesn't matter. The only important fact is that we're wadding through the universe of this piece with its happiness and sadness, its chaos and serenity, its evils, its goods, and everything in between, word by word by word, and we're doing it together. Because here I am waiting for you to read this sentence, prodding you on to make it to the next, and in between now and then, we get to know each other.

I won’t leave you dawdling with description anymore; I’ll tell you who I am, a question most people forget in the scrum of daily existence. Listen: Kacper is an intersection of personas, minds, states, feelings, ideas, thoughts, conversations, actions, sports teams, foods I liked, people I have hated, people who have hated me, books I’ve read, lessons I’ve learned, chairs I’ve sat on, friends I’ve made and lost, jokes I’ve remembered and forgotten, kisses I’ve planted and received, a mother’s wish, a father’s project, a brother’s mirror, a sister’s envy, a girlfriend’s love, an ex-girlfriend’s distrust, and a whole bunch of things I cannot recall now. To have the audacity to sum it up, I am a clusterfuck.