#pencourpus

My fiction is that of a fish alien. Most of my nonhuman traits don't align with that fiction perfectly, and I am comfortable interacting with earth as a swamp monster. Sometimes my bones feel ancient, like I'm waking up in a new body hundreds of millions of years later. I am, in some strange way, still distinctly me in a way that is correct, but it's been twisted into something new too quickly for me to process.

i haven't been able to find a way to articulate it, but i feel like a Devonian beast that got buried in the mud and instead of fossilizing, I crawled out human. The connection is there, something happened, but I'm missing it. For years I've called myself an "alien in a skinsuit who got amnesia and forgot they were originally an alien but knows something is wrong". And I still stand by that, but I feel like it can apply to so many things. I am a fossil who never fossilized, I was supposed to be lost to evolution but got swept up in it, instead.

I adore human evolution, the process in which I and we became myself and ourself. Particularly, I've always been enamored by that amphibious step on land, the first breach of our first frontier. It probably meant nothing to us back then.

And that's another thing I love, they were us. You trace it back far enough and that's who we were. It's a part of time that I can not disconnect myself from.

I do wonder why it is the amphibious stage of this that gets me and nothing else. I don't have the same connection to our history as small, arboreal mammals as I do of our history as amphibians. Whatever reason it is, it's why I have a hard time attaching myself to human evolution as a whole. I am a screenshot, a specific few million years in time, shoved into a human body. This human body is mine, I understand how I have become this, but I have a few gaps in my memory, so to speak. I remember the swamps, the mud. But I don't remember the grass, the trees, the fields, or the fruits. I don't remember the shifting of my bones and spine into something that stands upright. That dissonance leads to an approximation of myself. Some sort of fish man, something that is trying to make up for this great distance of time between what I was and what I am. They say that Earth back then would have been Alien to us now, and I'd have to agree. Although I have not left this place, I can't help but feel like an alien in my own home.

My fiction, which has very much become a home for my mind in the nine years I've had it, was built in response to a lot of these emotions. It let me construct a home for myself that felt right, and so it is no wonder that any emotions I have about being alien is connected to my fiction. These feelings are, to bring in some other identities of mine, the crux of my plenanima. Any identity that stems from my experience being alien and amphibious and fictional is crucial to how I see myself.