I used to be a brash young man.

My parents were lowing across the flatness of Indiana. They cut hair. They turned wrenches. They drank beer. They ate pork. That was who they were.
I was rocketing into the sunset, traveling over the plains that had been created a millennium previous by slow and heavy glaciers.

I learned things and I became more important than I used to be, growing from the inside and shedding like a serpent. My old self could have been eaten for nutrients but it would have not been necessary thanks to the amount of prey animals. I wormed into a snake hole and gnawed on my fingernails. They were flaky because of nutrient deficiency.

Vitamin B deficiency caused deep ridges to form horizontally in my nails.
Zinc deficiency caused my cuticles to bleed at random and hangnails became chewable.
Iron deficiency caused me to become winded every time I climbed a staircase.
And every time I drank coffee I went partially insane.
I forgot about my parents and I envisioned myself growing a spine, rigid and straight.

I experienced death, which is unremarkable. I laughed, which was brash.

I invented stories about myself that included me being related to royalty, me being royalty, me being possessed by devils, me being on my last life in the karmic cycle, me being on a train in my dreams, me being an inhabitant of two universes at once connected by the brain stem, medulla, etc.

Even though my corpus callosum is a mass of tissue, like the rest of my brain, it is somehow more powerful. It connects the two hemispheres of my brain and, somehow, bridges the gap between the two. The corpus callosum is liminal. It was here in my brain when I went to France in my dreams.
I don’t hate my brain. Je ne deteste pas le grande gris. In my dreams I spoke perfect French.

Having experienced a degree of success at the hands of travel on the metaphor of a rocket, I decided that travel was necessary for me. This fact did not directly result in a rootless existence, but it contributed somewhat. This fact was a facet, like other facets.
From an early age, I found jigsaw puzzles tedious and infuriating. I enjoyed coloring books, which, from a psychoanalytical standpoint, could be interpreted as a cousin to jigsaw puzzles. This can be seen in the way in which completion of the activity occurs: filling in. Using colors or pieces. Prescribed or inscribed. Standardized tests dominated my existence as a child and this does not leave me feeling bitter.

I was a banal kid. Most kids are secretly banal.

Charlotte, North Carolina: You were never a part of my life.
Tucson, Arizona: You were never a part of my life.
Seattle, Washington: You are a mystery to me.
Idaho: You were never a part of my life.

I came to the city in search of mazes and liminal areas. I liked to walk around and so I did that often. I still do. Large bodies of water call to me. They say my name very quietly.

Sometimes I like to call my parents on the telephone while I look at large bodies of water. Rivers and lakes.
They tell about the goings on of the county and of my different relatives. I look at the water and I think about untilled cornfields and how they are both essentially the same thing. You can’t walk on them but you can swim. If you try to breathe inside, you will die and get lost forever.
The corn in Indiana grows higher than your head and requires large machines to harvest the kernels. They look like huge, mobile oilrigs. Essentially, they are that.

Whenever we finish speaking, I always make a point to say I love you. It is always sincere. I never learned to swim.

But none of these things have to do with the fact that, above all, I enjoy wearing hats. I have only three, but I enjoy them equally. This is not a metaphor for personality. It is a statement about my enjoyment of hats and that I like to wear them.