I feel ears, though not my own.
Spreading and changing with my emotions.
I feel a tail, resting behind me.
I feel fur, coating my skin, and my hair feels unnatural in its absence.
Who are we, within our minds?
Can we change what we are, with merely a thought?
...I see faces all around me, I see none. Do I know what my own face looks like?
If I imagine my self as something Other, will my sense of self conform to that thought, as it has no face to anchor myself to?
I feel stationary ears. A flat back, laying crooked as I recline over its bones. Skin that pulls taut as I stretch out my fingers.
When you pay closest attention to it, even the body you’ve known your whole life can feel alien. Can feel Other.
I can picture my eyes. My glasses. My hairstyle.
I cannot picture my face.
Where is my anchor to who I am? How fickle is it, this ‘identity’ that people claim to be unchanging, and yet it feels like I can trip it, reshape it, like the flick of a lever.
How much of my identity is real, and what else is just a Headcanon, a character derived from my own head? How many of my actions are simply willed that way in a bid not to be Out Of Character?
I know, and yet I don’t know the boxes I fit. All of them, perhaps. Or none of them. Either way, I’m unsure.
I feel what I look like, and I toy with the Other. The core of me stays the same, yet my Identity seems to be a whirling eddy of currents that coalesce around it, some that come and go like the tide, others that just bring shells and shipwrecks and interesting things- which seem fascinating at first, but then are gone, never to be seen again.
I am the same. I am Other. I am nothing, and everything.
I am me, and I watch curiously as my identity changes around me. Wondering if one day I’ll wake up, and Me will have drifted away. Leaving just my consciousness, buffetted in the swirling of the tides.