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Untitled, by Helena.

Have I lost my mind?

You may ask yourself this, yes. You may find yourself contemplating this over and over as the days tick by and the little tickle at the back of your head gains strength, as if fed by the passage of time. You may find this thought recurring more and more as that tickle doubles, rebounds, gains shape and speaks to you.

You may even find this a comforting thought, as the new streams of consciousness trickle alongside your own, offering opinions, memories, and images that you know are not your own, for they lack your scent, and instead distinctly reek of Someone Else. You may be soothed by such thoughts, for if you have indeed lost your mind, perhaps medical science has come up with a little white pill that will solve everything.

So when you are making your way through life as you always have, measuring out your days in pinches here, dashes there, is it any wonder, when Someone Else speaks up inside you, inside the mind that you always thought was yours exclusively, your inborn right, that you push it away? Can anyone blame you for clapping your hands over your eyes and shouting that you, and you alone, exist?

And then what do you do when Someone Else continues to insist upon their own existence, their own right to be? What do you do when many Someone Elses' voices outshout your own?

Perhaps you continue to wonder. Perhaps you continue to believe, somewhere deep inside, that you have indeed lost your mind, succumbed to a strange madness that a little white pill could never touch. Perhaps you believe that you are lying to yourself, even as you speak to the newly discovered others, even as you come to accept that the right to exist in a body was not granted to you alone.

Ah, and as you watch them take command of the body you once thought was solely yours, even as you sit beside them and observe, you may still wonder, for sometimes the boundary between you seems so thin. You ponder whether or not you are somehow inventing all of this, putting on an elaborate show for attention, even as you jointly plot how to piece together an image of singularity for the world to see.

Still, you wonder: Have I lost my mind?

Yet to do so would imply that it was ever solely yours to lose.