you
are a middle-aged woman with skin that has turned more into leather mask than a face as you have been in the sun. you are a vitamin d addict with the burning need to stain white skin, brown. you have spent twenty-five years in and out of dermatologists' offices, asking for opinions and second opinions on the warped moles on your back and the bleeding sores on your chest. you have two children, whom you view as distractions from your mission to capture your forever-young. you are forty-five in december, but halfway through november, those riotous patches of skin will spread like poison ivy. you will die three weeks after your birthday- untanned, unloved, and bald.

you
are a teenaged boy with freckles and a small nose. you are a sad soul, an epicentre for all things tragic. you are run-down and marked with tire-treads and pale lip imprints, a product of society more than anyone, despite the war you wage against it. you have sharp-angled lips and stand with crooked shoulders. you are made of skin and bone and tissue like every other human, that is the irony. you are a human, but you are filled with a magic that the world seems to have left behind. you are not bound to be living in a reminiscence, you will be untouchable.

you
are an old man living by yourself in the house your father built. your wife, whom you had been married to for sixty-eight years, passed away last june. you wake up in the bed you shared, feeling the empty space on your back and a cold breeze, despite the sheets being tucked closely to your spine. you rise an hour past dawn, and shuffle in slippers with worn-out toes to the kitchen to make tea- earl grey was her favourite, and it is yours now, too. you sit in one of the two rocking chairs on the front porch from post-lunch until dusk, swatting mosquitoes and humming a song to yourself in a thrumming voice. bedtime is when the stars come out. you still miss her.

you
are a wide-eyed preschool child with a lost-tooth gap between your eye teeth. your father holds a polaroid camera with an ear-to-ear, cheek-splitting grin as you stand with your backpack over your shoulders and a crown with your name, bus number, and address written around it. you are growing up, he tells you. you aren't my little baby anymore.

you
are everything but you.