I'm a fake.

Now don't get me wrong, I am . I really am. And while I may langourously admit the falsehood that permeates me to my bones, it is mitigated by the near certainty that you are one, too.

In all those of years of my own therapy and training, in fifteen years of being supervised and supervising, of facing the avoidance and denial of which I was constructed, I never once felt I had really smelt flesh. Of course I howled like a baby, lay curled in the corner of a north london drawing room, danced like a bear but for all that I never felt close to an imperative or essential sense of myself. Without being wholly aware of my duplicity, I was making all the right noises. And now at forty seven as I become more entrenched in the familiar defence mechanisms and resemble further the dreamy teenager I tried and failed to heal, I am aware that no fundamental change was, or is, possible. So what am I now, if not the happiest fake on earth? I tried, didn't I, yes I did. I tried.

And what is it, anyway, to be false? I sometimes wonder if it isn't the entire engine of existence. It may be that in sleep, as I dream, I am identical to myself. Yet it'll be the fake who steps out of the bed.