It arrived from outside, weeks after you did. Other people chose it, said it at you, day after day, until you turned toward it like a plant toward light. Had they chosen differently, you would turn to a different sound, and nothing in you would be otherwise. You were here before your name. Whatever you are wears the name; it cannot be the name. Set it down.

Now the body. You will want to stop here — surely I am this.

Listen to how you speak of it, though. My body. My hands, my back, my face. The same grammar you use for your coat and your car — and a possession requires a possessor standing apart from it.

The body you had at seven is gone — not changed, gone, its substance fully traded for new substance, the way a river is never the same water. If you were the material, you would have died and been replaced already, several times over, and the seven-year-old would be a stranger. Yet something looked out of those eyes then, and looks out of these eyes now, and you know with total certainty it is the same something. The water changed. The river is not the water.

More simply: you feel the body. Its weight in the chair, its breath, its small pains. The body is the most intimate thing you observe. It is still observed. Not this.