Are We Ever the Same Person Twice? A love letter to the synaptic mess inside us all.

Marie Anne Arreola, Mexico

TW: paranoia, failure, existential dread, tangled neurons, fangled neurons, viscous

boundaries, dystopian landscapes, parallel universes, breath-holding, death-beholding, and

the type of love that makes you speak in tongues or fall silent completely. What are we really

doing when we hug? Are we testing the tensile strength of skin? Measuring the radius of

absence between two people? I keep thinking it’s a ritual. A ceremony not just of connection

but containment; a way of cradling the unspeakable without letting it leak. Did I say

unspeakable horrors? Because that’s what this is about. That tight-chested moment of

intimacy when you’re holding someone who doesn’t know how to say, I think I’m unraveling,

but you feel it anyway. The silent sobs that show up in the neck, in the way their hands rest

not on your back but against it, as if touch itself is a decision they’re trying to survive.

I have wanted, more than once, to unzip my lover’s skull and walk in with a flashlight.

Cartoon plumber style. Blue overalls, rubber gloves, a toolbox full of nervous jokes and sugar

packets. Not to fix him, just to look around. Dust the attic corners. Light some candles.

Scribble something on a post-it and stick it on the hippocampus. But how do you love a

clump of synapses that fire like fireworks in a hurricane? That confuses hunger with grief, joy

with warning bells? The science offers neat lines and graphs—“what fires together wires

together”—as if brains are code, not narrative. As if a human being were a flowchart instead

of a flickering, half-remembered prayer. Spoiler: the melding of souls is final. Or maybe just

a hoax. I want to believe in it, though. I want to believe we’re not just falling toward each

other in the dark, trying to guess where our edges begin. That maybe we are matched messes.

Fellow travelers through the static. Like we showed up on this timeline with coordinated

neuroses for a reason.

I remember being four in scraps—an orange carpet like a psychedelic tide, a stereo that

gleamed like a spaceship. I remember building Lego versions of sacred places: my mother’s

silence, the hallway I’d sprint through when no one was watching, the bathroom where I

practiced disappearing. My body remembers joy in glimmers—my brother somersaulting

backwards off my shoulders, squealing something that sounded like flight. But I can’t access

the interior of that child. Only her echoes. Only the ghost of what she might’ve believed.

Maybe that’s what memory is. A haunted archive. We remember the shadow the moment cast

more than the moment itself. A love-shaped outline, but never the pulse. And so we try to

recreate it with hugs, with rituals, with absurdities. Absurdity is a kind of coping. That’s why

I say things like I want Idris Elba to handle the snakes for me. Because the snakes—fear,

memory, panic, shame—they writhe quietly under my ribs, and I think he would know how to

charm them. Or at least look good while trying.

Once, I dreamt of a snake. Thin as a vein, colored like copper and apple peel. It slithered

toward me not with menace, but purpose. Like it knew my name. Like it had traveled

centuries just to remind me of something I forgot on purpose. It slid up my arm like a

sentence, whispered itself into the spiral of my ear. I woke up with teeth marks I couldn't

explain. Some people have a clean line to their past selves. They say the child is father of the

man. That they can trace themselves back like a river to its spring. I envy that. I’m a divider.

A splintered self. My child-self feels like a foreign film I watched too young, dubbed badly

into a language I still don’t quite speak. I ask her in dreams: were you real? Were you me? Or

a draft I abandoned mid-revision?

Lately, my brain feels like a recycling bin of metaphors: origami folds, missed connections,

misfiring fireflies. I say things like: mountain fold, valley fold, squash, petal, reverse swivel,

and nothing beautiful comes of it. My metaphors pile up like crumpled paper. I want to make

a swan. I get a soggy cube. I hold plates I should let go of. I carry conversations like

landmines. I mix up tenderness with tension. I want my inner operations to feel like water

again. Wet-folded, smooth, inevitable. Like a woman in love with the motion of her own

body, pouring tea, planting basil, saying yes without needing to justify it.

I want the way I love to be ceremonial. Not performative, but sacred in its absurdity. Like

breathing into a storm and expecting it to soften. And so I hug. Often. Without needing to

solve anything. Without fixing or folding or interpreting. Maybe hugs are how we say, I see

it. The fracture. The fire. The snake with its many names. I’ve got one too. Maybe it’s not

about merging or saving, but about witnessing. And maybe being capable of saying me too

with our arms instead of our mouths—is the closest we get to actual magic.

Marie Anne Arreola is a 23-year-old bilingual writer from Sonora, Mexico. She writes poetic essays that explore identity, memory, and survival through a feminist and culturally reflective lens. Her work bridges memoir and critique, often drawing from pop culture and digital life. She is the Editor in Chief of VOCES magazine and has been featured in international platforms.