You.

Who am I? Who do I think I am?
The first letter of the alphabet is A, and the fastest land animal is the cheetah, which can run at one hundred and twenty kilometers per hour.
Why do they want to teach me these things?
"For independence is the absolute right of my God-worshipping nat--"
Good morning, class, how are you today? Fine, thank you!
Teacher, I feel bad; yesterday my mother locked herself in the bathroom.
What was my father’s name again?
Why do they want to teach me who I am?
Maybe I do not know, but they do. They were always the ones who knew best, and all the stupidity was in me, and I could never get high marks on exams, and I could never run to my father with a certificate of merit and ask for a new dress, a new toy, a new bicycle, and besides I did not know where my father was anyway, who my father was, I did not know that either, and why my mother would not look at my face, why my mother would not look at me—
Yes, yes. When I was born they gave me an identity. A number, a name I could not read, could not understand, and frankly did not care about. Then the time came when I was supposed to care. They taught me how to read. They taught me how to memorize, too.
I-den-ti-ty.
Mother, what lovely words I learned today!
Identity: my name is , my surname is .
I am. I am. I am_____. I, I, I, I, I, I.
Everything, everyone is an I!
As for the essential I, I do not know!
Perhaps I do not even want to know!
But when they asked me—no, more than asked, when they shouted at me with rage, with fury… with all their hatred, with blood at a boiling point, with every clot in their brains and every knife-mark on their wrists, with all the hatred spurting out of their gray bodies—then I had to bow my head, so the executioner could cut comfortably and bring this flailing fit upon the pedestal to an end… Sometimes, just to make them fall silent, I wept without breath through infected nights swollen with nightmares spilling out of my sleep. Alone. Curled up. Like a baby in the womb. Like a baby praying to be stillborn amid all those muffled screams.
Congratulations, you have graduated. We grant you the right to work under this toilet light for a salary of two loaves of bread and three cigarettes.
I said nothing; perhaps the world spun too much.
These days I watch the sea.
I watch those dark waves sometimes sinking and raising that small rotten boat.
Where is that old sea, that old blue, that old city?
Everyone asks this.
Sir, may we see your identification?
All those armed men ask me this.
Who am I? I do not want an identity.
Perhaps I want to be that rotten boat too.
Perhaps I want to sink as well.
In fact I am already sinking.
No, this is not one of my nightmares.
At last, the real thing.
Then it occurs to me: in this world there were people laughing inwardly at a disgusting funeral.
The one in the coffin was me.
So was the funeral.
So was the one burying.
So was the one killing.
I told you I wanted to be without identity—what is it you did not understand?
There was no funeral either.
I suppose you knew that.
Why did you never tell me anything properly?
How did I come to this?
Who
brought
me
to
this
state?

I saw it on the news the other day: a baby was born from a mother’s womb into a coffin, and fifty years later was buried in the earth.