Within Me… Five Selves

Within me,
there is a moon draped in silence—
not one that lights up the sky,
but one that illuminates my questions.
A moon that never reaches fullness,
because its glow is not born from its core,
but borrowed from the shadows others cast upon it.
Inside me,
five layers of “self” reside—each one dwelling in its own imagined body,
each breathing a dream left unfinished.
There is the self I appear to be—
the one who wears a smile to steady the world,
who seems assured, yet quietly trembles beneath the surface.

And there is the self I longed to become—
a reflection I only recognize in dreams,
the one who follows behind me whispering:
“If only you were braver…
if only you hadn’t hidden your wounds behind pride.”
Then, the self I will never be the one who lives freely, who chooses without hesitation,
whose path my feet once traced in a dream but I awoke before I could reach her.
There is also the self I am not allowed to become—
not by life,
nor by you,
nor by a world that binds love in chains
and lets the closest ones clip your wings.
And then…there is the fifth.
The self born between all the others — the one writing these words now,
asking quietly:
Who am I, really?
Do I even own my face?
Or am I merely the reflection of everyone else’s?