Siyahi Stories · 6 poems · A Cerebral Detour

Proof of Life

Six attempts to answer a simple question — what exactly makes you you — each one failing more interestingly than the last.

Six poems · one interrogation · from the Siyahi archive

“Proof of life” is a bureaucratic phrase, usually needed for a pension form or a hostage negotiation — some third party demanding evidence that you are still, in fact, you, and still, in fact, here. It turns out to be a surprisingly difficult thing to prove on your own terms, without a form. This is a walk through six poems — almost all of them English, almost all of them closer to prose than verse, which feels right, since this isn't really a mood you sing your way out of — that keep trying to pin down what a self actually is, and keep, admirably, failing.

IThe first mistake is trying to become someone else

Before you can even ask what defines you, you have to catch yourself doing the thing that makes the question urgent: quietly filing yourself down to fit somebody else's finished shape.

— chasing someone else's finished shape is its own quiet erasure. By the time you arrive at “successful,” there may not be much of the original left to congratulate. Read “In Quest” in the book →

It's a clean warning, almost a public-service announcement. But it assumes you know what your own unmolded identity even looks like — and that's precisely where things start to unravel.

IIBecause the moment you go looking, nothing holds still long enough to be the answer

What follows are two poems that read almost like a stand-up bit and a checklist, back to back — one glib, one methodical — both arriving at the same wall.

— language, genes, honesty, interaction, emotion, the present moment — every candidate for “you” gets floated and shot down in the space of a breath, until the only thing left standing is the least satisfying answer of all: you're just an abstraction. Read “The Language You Speak” in the book →

— the body ages, the brain rewires, the mood shifts by the minute, the heartbeat spikes by the second. Not the people around you, not the place you stand, not even your dreams or your past survive as a stable answer. Everything offered up gets disqualified for the same reason: it changes. Read “What Defines You” in the book →

Read together, these two poems form a pincer movement on the same target, from two different tones of voice — one playful, one clinical — and neither one lands a hit. Which raises an uncomfortable possibility: maybe the question was never going to have a stable answer, because the thing being asked about was never stable to begin with.

IIIWhich starts to make sense once you notice what's actually in charge

If nothing about the self holds still, the next suspect is the thing that keeps everything moving in the first place.

— how happy or sad we feel about anything is, in the end, a function of how much time has passed. An absurd amount of authority to hand over to something that only moves in one direction and has no idea how to stop. Read “Time” in the book →

This is the shortest fuse in the whole set — genuine, almost comic exasperation at discovering that the dumbest, most mechanical force imaginable is quietly running the emotional weather of an entire life.

IVAnd under time's rule, there's actually a shape to how much say you get

Just when the interrogation threatens to spiral into nihilism, one poem steps back far enough to offer something almost like comfort — not an answer, but a pattern.

— no control before birth, none after death — and inside that span, a slow arc: helpless as a child, most in charge somewhere in the middle, and gradually surrendering control again with age. A single curve, rising out of helplessness and quietly returning to it. Read “We Have the Least Control” in the book →

This is the calmest voice in the whole essay, and it earns that calm honestly — not by solving the identity question, but by reframing the whole search. If control itself is a temporary loan, maybe the self was never supposed to be a fixed thing you could locate and hold onto. Maybe it was always meant to be read as a curve, not a coordinate.

VWhich brings the whole search back to where it started, only wiser about it

The closing poem doesn't answer anything either. It just widens the original confusion into a full inventory of human contradiction — and somehow that feels like the most honest ending available.

— forgetting is easy, remembering is hard; letting go is easy, holding on is not. We speak more easily than we listen, judge more easily than we understand, err more easily than we forgive. Why are we built this way? Easy to ask. Difficult, as ever, to answer. Read “So Easy to Forget” in the book →