Letter: Split in Pieces

Orion,

Do you ever feel like two people? No, a hundred; a thousand? Do you ever think that freedom comes at such a cost, and that happiness does too?

I say, where does who I am end and who I become begin?

I am, in many ways, myself. But even that is everchanging as the reflections on a rippling water's surface. Constantly influenced. Constantly adjusting to the circumstances. Should I hold my own a little more? Should I be who I am or who I become?

In some ways, I am everything. All knowing, all powerful. King of my own destiny; maker of ideas and my own world. And yet none of it comes to fruition without people, or earth, or day, or night. Should the daylight take hold of me, I am one being. Should the night, I am another. It is the same of those around me. My face a mirror, a ripple, just light glinting off the edge of glass. Bouncing effortlessly from one state to the next.

I readjust. I am many people and many faces. One who is joyous, one who is tired. One who believes strongly, one who is weak. One who is adventurous, one who is cowardly. I have changed, and I no longer can distinguish selves from other.

There are two minds. Rational; dream. What the rational mind knows the dream mind rejects. What the dream mind conjures the rational mind denounces as impossibilities. I live in a thin space between the two, where both come to me, pleading, and I, knowing nothing and having no assurance, sit idly by and make rash judgements. I cannot be governed by either. For the rational mind rules with fear, and the dream mind with hope. Reality sits with me in between.

Who am I to deny a dream its influence? To let the promise of something beautiful be enough to wrap my fingers around it, grab it, let it drag me to its natural end. It sounds easy until the rational chides me. There is nothing so beautiful as to be worth the cost. There is no action without an opposing reaction. There is no such folly equal to following what is unproven; what is only a dream.

I am torn in two, or four, or eight. Continuously and indefinitely. Each face not recognizing the other. I am more soul than body, more space than presence. There is no end to what has no beginning.

Forgive me, I have written with no end in sight. I seek answers no mortal can give. Just know that I consider everything just so. And that for that, I am aggrieved. In this world I may only take one action per decision, and I handle each carefully. Forgive me, then, if I make the wrong one.

Yours truly,

Artemis