Anthony's Literary Lens

Tag: self

  • The shadow self

    The shadow self

    There’s something peculiar about shadows that I never noticed until that Tuesday afternoon in September. I was sitting at my usual coffee shop, the one where the barista always remembers to make my americano with exactly three ice cubes, when I saw it behaving strangely.

    The simple shadow of a beach tree on my garage wall.

    My shadow wasn’t following my movements anymore. When I lifted my cup, it kept its arms firmly planted on the table. When I turned my head to look at the clock on the wall, it continued staring straight ahead. It was subtle at first, like the way you might notice a photograph hanging slightly crooked on a wall but convince yourself it’s just your imagination.

    Me pretending to be an angel

    The thing about shadows is that they’re honest in a way we can never be. They don’t pretend to smile when they’re sad. They don’t hide their true shape behind carefully chosen clothes or practiced postures. They simply are.

    I started watching my shadow more closely after that day. Sometimes, late at night, I’d catch it dancing when I was perfectly still, or reaching for things I’d been wanting but was too afraid to grasp. It was as if it knew all my secrets, all the desires I’d buried so deep I’d forgotten they were there.

    One morning, I found a note on my desk written in a hand that looked like mine but wasn’t quite right. It said: “I am what you are when no one is watching. I am the you that exists in empty rooms and dark corners. I am the truth you hide from the world.”

    The strange thing wasn’t finding the note. The strange thing was realizing that every word was true.

    Now, whenever light falls across my path and stretches my shadow long and dark against the ground, I wonder which one of us is more real – the carefully constructed person I present to the world, or that dark silhouette that moves with its own will and knows every truth I’ve ever tried to hide.

    Sometimes, in the moments between sleeping and waking, I think I can feel us merging – the shadow and I – like water flowing into water. But then morning comes, and once again, we are separate: me walking through the world, and my shadow dancing just at the edge of sight, reminding me of everything I could be if I just dared to face it directly.

    The barista at my coffee shop doesn’t make me americano anymore. She says I never ordered one. She says I’ve been ordering black coffee, straight and bitter, every day for years. Maybe my shadow knew this all along.

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  • The Room Without Doors

    The Room Without Doors

    I wake up, as always, in the same room. The walls are gray, but I don’t remember if they were always gray or if they simply absorbed the color of my thoughts over time. There is a door, but it does not open. Or maybe it does, and I have forgotten how to turn the handle. In any case, I do not leave.

    Loneliness is not an event. It does not arrive with fanfare or explanation. It is a slow accumulation, like dust settling in corners you rarely notice. You do not decide to be alone; you simply wake up one day and realize that no one has knocked on your door for a long time.

    At first, I tried to fight it. I wrote letters, but I had no one to send them to. I walked the streets, but the people I passed were like shadows, their faces indistinct, their voices muffled. I tried to summon memories of warmth, of conversation, of touch. But memories are unreliable—paper-thin imitations of something that once had weight. Eventually, even they began to fade.

    There is a man who sometimes appears in my dreams. He wears a hat, smokes a cigarette, and speaks in riddles. Last night, he sat across from me at a café that no longer exists and stirred his coffee without drinking it.

    “You are mistaken,” he said. “You think loneliness is an absence, but it is not. It is a presence.”

    “A presence?” I asked.

    “Yes,” he said. “Like fog. Like hunger. It fills the spaces between things. It grows when you try to ignore it.”

    I woke up before I could ask him what to do.

    This morning, I stood in front of the mirror for a long time. My reflection looked unfamiliar, like a photograph left in the sun too long. I touched the glass, as if trying to confirm my own solidity. I wondered, briefly, if I had become a ghost. But no—ghosts haunt others. I haunt only myself.

    Outside, the world continues. People board trains, read newspapers, fall in love, make mistakes, grow old. I remain here, in my room without doors, waiting for something that will not come.

    Perhaps the man in my dream was right. Loneliness is not an absence. It is a thing with shape and substance. It sits beside me as I write this. It watches over my shoulder. It will be here tomorrow.

    And the day after that.

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