I previously posted a photo of Jackson Pollock’s painting Number 31, painted in 1949.
“My mind is a jumble,” Riley wrote in a poem (I mentioned this here once before, sometime in 2020). I tell the people who live with me or interact with me now, and who’ll hopefully be around if I, like my parents before me, grapple with some form or degree of dementia in my last years, that they must, absolutely must, tell the people in whose care I’m placed that the population I talk about, the people whose skins and brains and lives I seem to shift in and out of, are not a sign of madness, multiple personality disorder, or some brand of schizophrenia (a disease I barely understand and probably shouldn’t even reference).
No, I am afflicted by characters. I contain multitudes of lives and minds and hearts who never leave me. Each of them can, all at once or at different times, be my own heart, my soul, my memory, my past, present, future. In all the folds of my brain, they coexist among a lifetime of friends, colleagues, family members, heartbreakers, healers, poets, liars: shining examples of all that is flawed and sublime about humans. When my last chapter unfolds, I may not be able to say who is real and who is imagined.
In the end, everyone is a bit of both, probably.