beginning

"I'm beginning to know myself. I don't exist.
I'm the space between what I'd like to be and what others made of me.
Or half that space, because there's life there too...
So that's what I finally am...
Turn off the light, close the door, stop shuffling your slippers out there in the hall.
Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.
It's a cheap world."

— Fernando Pessoa, "[I'm beginning to know myself]" in Poems, trans. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown