Persona

Something struck me this weekend when talking to one of my friends, who felt he was facing an identity crisis. His real self was fine. More or less, his digital self was having a nervous breakdown. He had asked himself, who was he supposed to be on the internet? I didn't answer. It didn't occur to me he was deathly serious.

I saw what he was getting at. I've been writing fiction nearly all my life, listening to voices in my head speaking back and forth seems perfectly natural to me. Of course I always suspected it's merely a thin line between storytelling and full-blown insanity, which is root to the persistent doubt when trying to build a world from words. The difference? Not sure. Thought I narrowed it down to this: When you tell stories, your characters speak in different tongues, and when you're insane, their tongues replace yours.

Maybe I was taking this too lightly. I look at my daughters and try to figure them out. Who are they? They are still young, still live in a fragile world of make-believe that I feel is criminal to disrupt.

Who am I? In one of my stories, a character took a piece of college ruled paper and separated herself. I decided to give this a try. There's me, talking to you right now, who I guess is me as I always talk to anyone. There's me, the father. There's me, the husband. There's me, the writer. There was me, the student, who left too soon to believe it really was goodbye. Me, the reader. One persona?

The Holy Trinity: Father and Son and Ghost. One persona. When I was in elementary school, I sketched three men sharing one body: one white beard, wrathful, fiery eyed God attached to the hip of His Son, neatly trimmed beard, pleasant smile, who was attached to a ghastly, hooded skull-faced spirit, vaguely reminiscent of Skeletor. When did He grow aware of His simultaneous existence?

Easter's over, but being a Catholic who routinely overslept church, I felt compelled to give a short synopsis of the Passion to my oldest daughter, who is still frustrated not knowing who keeps turning off the lights and makes night. Regarding this question, I let her know about the light switch God has in his bedroom, and although He no longer sleeps, He still uses the switch out of habit. She understood habit, having seen me checking the locks on the door, the burners on the stove several times before going to bed. It's kind of like that.

Regarding the question of Easter, I tried to invoke in my answer the reverence of Linus in Charlie Brown's Christmas. She seemed to get the gist, and asked, "So . . . Jesus died. And then He woke up."

"Yes," I said. I let that marinate for a while.

Then she said something along the lines of: "Has this happened to anyone else?"

I told her there was this guy named Lazarus. He died. Jesus touched his arm, and he shot right up. Back from death. Brand new. There were other stories, mostly fiction, but I didn't elaborate on them, because we eventually would be speaking of the undead. Vampires and zombies and such. I didn't want the idea of coming back from the dead to terrify her yet.

"No," she clarified: "I mean, to someone we know?"

I'm not sure if I'm good at this father thing. I wasn't so good at the student thing. I'm not sure if I've been successful with any extension of myself. I can see why people want to start over. It's around this time of the year, I'm always fooled into believing our souls cycle through its own seasons, equinox.

Around the same time of drawing my version of the Holy Trinity, I asked the former nun, Was the resurrected Jesus the same man that He was moments before He died? She smiled and said, "Yes," and I didn't believe her.

He had to have been someone new, with a different personality. We see clones of bulls act differently than the original owners of their DNA, which replicated, gave them birth.

Lazarus woke. He sat for a moment, looked around and saw the faces of his mourners. Was he pretending to be Lazarus? Yes. Lazarus was dead.