Day 3

HELLO
My name is

Writers aren't born

properly labeled, so it's

hard to know one when

one appears.

Julianna Baggott

The only part of my life's label that remains

perfectly legible is:

HELLO

My name is

The space below is a smeared mess of

edit marks, erasures,

even some sharpied scribbles

followed by so many exclamation points

that Mark Twain would feel obligated to make a

snide comment about my

self-perceived comedic prowess.

Or would it be F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Either way, some part of my buried past

is a joke.

At the moment, the space is filled with 

three letters,

uppercased, bolded and rebolded:

HELLO

My name is 

MOM

Though the very act of my fingers keying words

on this page will cause it to change.

I think I just felt the "p" soak into the tip

of my right pinkie, and travel with

the blood in my veins, making its way

back to my heart

and out of my skin to settle

below the red header, morphing the letters

that beat along with my heart this morning

as I dropped my children off at the airport

to visit their dad.

The "o" is already there,

no need for a replacement.

The soon-to-be-former resident "m"

rotates a quarter turn to the left,

and the "t" hops from keyboard to chest

to complete the me of the moment.

A skilled forensics specialists could lift

those letters

and the ones that came before

to reveal my identities all the way back.

Some would be easily discovered:

wife, teacher, daughter, friend.

Others would be harder to decipher,

their letters grown

faint from lack of use, or

from denial.

There was a time when

HELLO

My name is 

Runner

held its position for months at a time,

though if I'm honest with myself,

it must have been surrounded with invisibly inked

words like lonely, desperate, afraid.

And there have been plenty of times when

HELLO

My name is

Imposter

held the space hostage.

Sharpied scribbles and exclamation points

soon to follow.

Today, I'm content with an adaptive

white space, even if it means the white

has transformed into ever-changing

shades of gray.

The black and white

of my world ended

so long ago.

HELLO

My name is

HELLO

My name is

HELLO

My name is