are you a mage? unwelcome thoughts enter my brain as i struggle once again to distance my self from the fiction being read in $CURRENT_DATE. you can't be doing this again, it sneers. do you exist beyond the veil of metaphors and fiction describing your proposed existence? who are you, aoife?
i remain silent. i do not know the answers to these questions, and i am afraid of finding out—rather, afraid of fizzling out into nothingness, having never been. a soberer self, perhaps an alter, would call this symptom "derealization", but right now there is no self, and no time.
but there is something, It says, ever inquisitive. something is willing these words onto the page. It is not wrong. "but who?", we both ask simultaneously. when you strip away fiction and lore, mythos and thesis, who remains? aoife, It says, and that is its name, and Its name, and mine.
It smiles.