Occasionally, a memory or a thought comes out in the third person. The boy. The man. He.
I suppose you can reason it away. The thought is too close to the bone. The memory needs a proper distance to be heard and seen and felt.
The theories are all almost reasonable since the writing is almost always an unconscious motion. Appearing like a flash in a non-editing state when it marks itself out on the white page.
But I know better. Everything I’ve ever written is an “I” — all the He and She and You that I’ve ever told a story with.
It is I, I, and more I every time.
Because I know that just as everyone in every dream is a version of yourself, so is every pronoun.
(I’ve heard of some who would go so far as to suggest that every person you meet is a version of yourself, though that can only be true up to a certain point.)
I am always the subject. First person, singular.
Which I know leads to problems: A separateness that seems real because my feet are not attached to the ground, but that is nonetheless false in the same way that Watts pointed out an apple is part of an apple tree even if you don’t find it on the tree.
And so is He and Him and She and You and, even, Them.
