# Identity I am the shadow of my father's footstep, the echo of my mother's sigh. I am the name they gave me before I learned to speak it. I am the place where two rivers meet, neither one, yet both— a confusion of currents, a marriage of waters that will never quite be still. I am the space between languages, the word that dies on my tongue before it reaches air, the thought that lives in one language and dies in translation. I am the sum of a thousand small surrenders, each one a thread in the tapestry they call my life. I stitch myself together each morning from borrowed cloth. I am the question mark at the end of my own sentence, the uncertainty that walks beside me like a familiar ghost. I am what they made me, and what I make of their making— this constant argument between the self I was given and the self I am stealing. I am the bridge that no one crosses twice, forever holding two shores apart while pretending to join them. I am the answer that arrives too late, the word spoken into an empty room, the song that echoes only in the chambers of my own ear. I am, therefore I doubt. I am, therefore I question. I am, therefore I disappear.