A Gorilla-Shaped Husk

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An empty tin can
Accusations echo through
Its hollow innards

*

I, a painted face
On wooden marionette
And stone for a heart

*

I am without pain
Nor pleasure nor anything
What, then, could I be?

*

He would work and toil
And sing and dance in hopes of
Finding his maker

*

I’m reminded of my 7th birthday. We owned a charming brick bungalow in Zimbabwe’s capital city. The yard was large, and dominated by a tree that my neighbor, Casper, and myself would climb often. At least until he fell and broke his arm and we were both forbidden from it.

My mother threw a large party for me and invited all our friends and neighbors. There was music, games, an army of kids running around. We had play wars between the handful of boys and the overwhelming number of girls. We had musical chairs and prizes and all the sugar a human-sized tornado could ever want.

This birthday sticks clearly in my mind, more so than all but one other a few years later, because it marked a turning point in my perception of self. More precisely, that I had a self that was separate from others. Kids may know this, maybe even understand the words, but some don’t internalize this knowledge intuitively until a little later. The age differs, and some never actually get there. For me, it was my 7th birthday, and whether that was late or early, I couldn’t say.

It was at this birthday party that I first began to notice girls as this separate and desirable thing. The source of my first crush. (Her name was Xena, the eldest daughter of some family friends. A few years older than me).

It was the last time I ever danced in public. I became keenly aware of the difference between my energy and other people’s, and realized that I didn’t like dancing, or attention, or people for that matter.

It was also then that I acquired the most haunting sense of myself, one that would linger and disquiet me into adulthood. The realization that there was nothing to me. That I had no voice, no power, no presence, no purpose, I just was. I remember the feeling in that terrifying way that only a 7 year old could. A 7 year old who lacked the tools to process them.

Was there an exact moment? I doubt it. I don’t remember. What I remember is a growing sense as the day wore on. Little things that I normally wouldn’t have paid much attention to, and that today I’d know to dismiss as noise, but that at the time were explosions to my newly awakened senses.

The fact that I never won any of the games in my own party seemed to mean more than it should have. The fact that during the boys vs girls war, I not only took no leadership, but was completely forgotten while I hid (there was a weird hide and seek component to it), and that no one wanted to play what I wanted to play. Which thankfully didn’t matter because I wanted to do whatever Xena wanted to do. The fact that all my friends, despite not really knowing each other, seemed to get along better with each other than me.

I can look back at those things now and chuckle to myself. But I lacked the experience to process the burgeoning loneliness. I lacked the experience to notice that I was imposing it on myself. And thus, I lacked the experience to stop myself from encoding it into my core personality subroutines. It started there, and confirmation bias did the rest.

I had discovered I was an alien. (It turns out I’m actually just a Gorilla pretending to be human. Not an alien. But the “alien-ness” is all the same.)

I have a rich inner life now, but from time to time I still worry that there’s nothing more to me than the meat suit and mask I wear every morning before heading out. I rationally know I’m not empty, but I’m periodically haunted by that feeling I first experienced on my 7th birthday. What if this is it? What if I’m an NPC and everything I think I experience is just what I’ve been programmed to experience and I don’t exist unless the “protagonist” is interacting with me. Whoever the protagonist is.

It thankfully doesn’t happen often anymore. And when it does, I usually just have to take stock of everything, shrug, and get back to creating whatever I happen to be creating. I am not just an empty husk, I’m the world’s most brilliant Gorilla.

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