Who's The Impostor?

I heal every time I sleep,

though healing feels like betrayal.

Waking up means peeling skin

off a flesh that should look mine,

but neither the skin

nor the flesh feel mine.

I feel someone trapped

in the blank spaces in between;

a ghost haunting

the grammar of a language long forgotten.

It’s like a house of cards collapsing

in cinematic slow motion,

and when the last card falls,

you realise it was never about cards. 

It was a jigsaw of a man,

with the face piece missing,

as the puzzle desperately hopes

it’s mistaken for the complete being.

It feels wrong

to even desire goodness;

it feels indecent,

like stealing light

from a dying star.

Everything good that has ever happened

feels like an aftertaste of deceit,

a magic show of manners.

My pretense of me

was a sleight of hand;

a lie so sly

truth mistook it for art.

The applause was never for the act,

it was for the audacity

of pulling myself off convincingly.

People called it charm,

but charm is just

a costume for hunger.

I’ve learned to exist like a rumour —

believable,

yet dubiously questionable.

Some days I’m hollow inside,

some days hollow outside,

and most days

I can’t tell the difference.

I am the echo

that answers before the question is asked,

the reflection that blinks before the eye,

the laughter

that doesn’t remember its joke.

There’s a bureaucracy to being alive —

each breath

must justify its expense,

each sigh

weighed under necessary illusion.

Every time I whisper I’m fine,

something inside bursts into applause,

mocking the performance.

The audience is gone,

yet the show goes on, 

as if meaning itself

were a renewable resource of delusion.

And then there are those

who still pray to a silence

and call it God.

But I’ve seen that silence.

It echoes like an empty factory of faith,

mass-producing guilt,

distributing hope

in the shape of obedience.

God was the name we gave

to our inability to tolerate randomness.

A celestial scapegoat.

A customer-care executive

hand-crafted in delusion,

we invented to hold the line

while we sobbed into the receiver.

I have no God,

only recurring hallucinations of order.

No heaven,

only well-marketed denial.

No soul,

just a consciousness with separation anxiety.

If there is divinity,

it’s in the lie we perfect to stay breathing.

If there is salvation,

it’s in how beautifully we pretend.

Healing is progress, they say.

But progress is just pre-lived pain 

ready to be lived all the same, all over again.

I don’t heal;

I repaint.

Some call it redemption, 

I call it marketing.

Some call it faith, 

I call it placebo

with better screenplay.

I’ve spent eternities

selling myself hope I can’t afford,

wrapped in promises

that never expired

because I never lived

long enough to redeem them.

I keep reintroducing myself

to my own name:

each syllable counterfeit,

each tone rehearsed.

If identity is continuity,

I’ve long defaulted.

If living is performance,

I am both curtain

and collapse.

My hollowness no longer echoes;

it hums, 

a frequency too honest for language,

too silent for salvation.

And if something divine

is still watching,

I hope it’s embarrassed,

because I’m not.

I heal every time I sleep,

but the healed man never wakes.

Only the hollow one does

dressed in borrowed skin,

reciting borrowed prayers,

pretending this continuity

means more

than well-dressed decay.