Did I write you here? Did you read it? Do you? If I did and you do and so does everyone else, do you feel less yourself than you did before? Because reading you, you could be anyone, that guy smoking on the curb outside his council house beneath the lilac blossoming trees, that girl with the interesting face and the velvet choker you think might make you her, that kid on his skateboard.

Does this …

Never mind.

Did I skip the smell of your ironed linen, your burnt toast crumbs? Did I not write the song playing over the radio, the hot prickle between toes when you pull the running shoes from your feet (and your wet sockprints on the kitchen tiles)? If I leave out the air pressure the cloud shapes your slumped shoulders my bad teeth unglamorous morning hair your chewed nails the shape of you under your clothes and how you swing your arms when you walk… is that not you? That is, inaccurate, my omissions rubbing out your pencil line accuracies as I sketch them, ham-fisted, until it is only your shoelaces you recognise, and even those, they’re fuzzy, not right. Does that offend you?

Theoretically, as long as I have your shoelaces, I own you.

How about this, I write I hate you or I want you I am totally indifferent or I want to escape you, I twist something you said into a joke, at your expense. Or I make-up something you didn’t say but might have. If I listed your most inconsequential, your least noteworthy, moments (or your facial expressions, your conversations) with unbiased precision? Or maybe a little bit biased, maybe a lot, maybe I am laughing at you!

Ha. How do you know this you is you?

If I highlight your best points, exaggerate, wildly fabricate, if I cut nip tuck at your semi-fictional body better than any surgical knife could, assume at, before assuming completely, your third person voice… does this unnerve you, do you feel pedestalised, forced into being the words you’re assigned? And if you don’t quite make it, if you fall short…does this eat at you? Perhaps the harder you try, the further from this falsified description of yourself you step, chasing the white rabbit of your dream. Until one day you measure the you in the mirror against the words about you written a year or so ago, and find the two of you couldn’t be any less related if you tried.

Anyway, how do you know this is you I’m writing? Perhaps you are weighing up. This could apply. Whereas this, this does not apply, and this only maybe applies, three neat stacks like when I’m feeling indecisive and make yes no maybe piles. Perhaps the words that might be you, and the gestures that are very you and the hair colour removed only one tint from yours cancel out this bit, which you ignore because you think, maybe… maybe she stuck that in to throw me. Like cutting off the edge of a jigsaw puzzle to make it fit.

Is this too many questions?