The Composite Man

Monologue

The ink is running thin, and my hand does not hold the pen the way it used to. It is a heavy hand now, thick around the knuckles with a tremor that belonged to Old Man Grieves. He was a carpenter by trade, and I can feel the phantom ghost of a chisel in my palm whenever the wind turns cold. This is the record of what remains of me, though the 'me' part is becoming a very small room indeed. It always starts with the bread and the salt. The meal is dry, clinging to the roof of my mouth with a taste of copper and wet earth. When I lean over the body, I am not just taking the weight of their secrets; I am taking the geometry of their lives. The first few years were simple. A smudge of a memory here, a slight change in the pitch of my laugh there. But the accumulation is a slow, grinding process. It is less like a haunting and more like a renovation where the architect keeps changing their mind. My left leg is shorter than my right now. It belonged to a woman who spent forty years limping through the rye fields, and I feel her stubbornness in my hip every time I stand. My skin is a map of places I have never visited. There is a jagged scar across my ribs from a tavern brawl in a town three valleys over, and a pale, smooth patch on my forearm where a child once burned themselves with a candle. I carry these marks not as trophies, but as a ledger. There is a particular discomfort in the mismatch. My lungs sometimes forget how to breathe in rhythm with my heart; one wants the slow, shallow breath of a dying man, while the other beats with the frantic energy of a youth who died in a panic. It is an exhausting way to exist, a constant negotiation between a dozen different nervous systems. I spend my afternoons rubbing peppermint oil into joints that do not belong to me, trying to soothe the ache of a thousand different grievances. Yet, there is a quietness that follows the meal. I remember the look on the widow's face last Tuesday. The tension left her shoulders the moment I swallowed the last crumb of the salt bread. She could finally sleep, knowing the rot of her husband's anger was no longer his to carry into the soil. That is the part I hold onto. I am a vessel for the things that would otherwise poison the ground. I turn the jagged edges of a life into a smooth, if heavy, stone. I can feel the erasure starting in my peripheral vision. The edges of my own memories are fraying, replaced by the vivid scent of lavender and the sound of a lullaby I never learned. Soon, there will be no one left to hold the pen. I will be a collage of the village, a living archive of every mistake and every hidden shame. It is a crowded way to be, but I suspect it is a kind one. To be everyone is to finally understand that none of us were ever truly alone in our failings.