Portraits of people who do not exist—
I etch them into my memory,
record their stories, each one’s tale,
stories that never were.
I am a writer who writes of fantasies
lived by nonexistent beings.
Some more familiar than others,
yet all equally unknown in the end.
Where do the lives we dream of go?
Where do the loves forged in sleep dissolve?
Do all the people who visit my dreams
have names?
Or are they mere avatars, crafted by my hand
to stave off loneliness in the backrooms of my mind?
She is Alice. She does not truly exist.
She is not a person.
But she is Alice—a life I gift to you today,
a fragment I leave for you to dream impossible lives beside her.
Is she a mother, a daughter, a sister, a lover?
No. She is none of these.
She is Alice—a Non-Person.