There was a question I wanted answered more than I wanted anything else, and it could take my life to answer it. This question was What could I be? T… - Alexander Chee

WE ARE NOT WHAT we think we are. The stories we tell of ourselves are like thin trails across something that is more like the ocean. A mask afloat on the open sea. There were moments before the memory’s return when I experienced what I now understand as its absence as not a gap but a whole other self, a whole other me. As if a copy of me had secretly replaced me. An android of me moving through the landscape, independent of the other me, exactly like me but not me. Every now and then, I could see the distance between us. Three times, in particular, this other self had appeared before me.

The enormity of what had happened was not yet clear, but I decided if the world was going to end that day, I was going to need coffee to face it.

I was now both the secret and the keeper of it, but the idea that I could not know what is was I served, nor why, nor who, became nearly unendurable all at once