Chrysalis [ 08. It's Still Raining Inside ]

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You are Alphonse. 

You are sitting at the piano stool, fingers still standing rigid on the piano keys, tingling from swift and complicated manoeuvres. The smell of rain is in the air, but the rain itself is letting up.

You have just finished playing a song, which promptly slips out of your mind, already forgotten. You don't know what possessed you -- a while ago you were sitting by the window staring and listening to the rain, the next you plunged into a kind of trance. But you do remember an emotional outburst. The body remembers; and it's as if the melancholy is echoing still, resonating in the air, in the strings, buzzing about your ears like the insect's singing on a summer's day, in the strings of your own heart. A twang of pain deep in the chest.

Like angina pectoris, the heart is lacking oxygen. Your heart is lacking something.

You try to think about other things to distract yourself. Let's see. You find it peculiar that sometimes it feels like there are different entities inside you. The you playing piano just now, who was it? The you talking to your parents not often enough, the you giving up your seat to an old lady this morning, the you thinking those suicidal thoughts, the you crying too often when you flip the newspapers, the you in the eyes of others, the you (you think) in the eyes of others, the you still buried deep in the iceberg under the sea level, the façade of you, the awkward you in front of the person you like, the scheming you, the simple-minded you, the you who loves to crack jokes: these are all you.

You know that there is something called author's persona. This means that the writer projects himself on paper. This projection, however close to the author himself, deliberate or otherwise, is a separate entity from the author. The persona is, in other words, a 'façade'. The opinion on the paper is not the author's opinion, but the persona's. The 'I' on the paper is not the author, but the persona. This is why you get that strange feeling sometimes: the moment you put down "I" then it stops being yourself, it's another person, though it is infused with your person. Like a part of yourself is pulled out like a dough, estranged, alienated, transformed to something else. That is a persona.

On the other hand, a persona is also a 'shadow' because at the same time, the persona takes after the author himself: his opinions, his thoughts, his emotions, his idiosyncrasies. From the pool of all the different you's, you choose. You recall that Yeats once said that "[t]he creations of a great writer are little more than moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk on the earth." You think: how true.

Carrying the monologue further, you ask yourself, so there must be something like reader's persona? But of course. Again, a front -- you may not agree with the author's opinion (or his persona's for that matter), but at least you can understand, you can see it from that perspective, you are willing to make space, some allowance. This is your front as a reader, your persona. 
A market is the meeting of buyers and sellers but a book is the meeting of the author's and the reader's respective personae. In this respect human beings are dastardly beings, unable to take it up properly vis-à-vis, you think? The thing is, humanity is so fragile a thing that you need to build the hardy outer shell, lest it is weathered out and breaks down.

But you digress. So what does it mean? That 'you' comprises many different you's, with possibly more unawakened?

You are tired of thinking all this. You are closing your eyes. As the rain is fading away, your consciousness is also whittled little by little, fading.

A pitch black tunnel.

--

You are Alphonse.

Are you?

No?

Then who are you?