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There is that sense of myself
that is not the clothes I wear.
It is not whether I eat pastry or set the spoon down on the saucer.
It is not how I sit in the sunlight on a chair dappled with shadows.
It is not this pleasant feeling of torpor when my gaze leaves the page.
It is not exactly my contentment or my distress
although it holds both of these.
Rather it is
my night thoughts when I am not presenting to the world,
my wholeness and my fragments,
or memories of being a girl holding her crayon
who drew with slow deliberation
a hill
a house
a tree
a sun,
her perception of herself in that stick figure,
smiling.