This is one of the few documents which survived intact after my latest 'Word crash' and the subsequent purge of all my recent writing. I'd written it a few months back, and it had sat forgotten.

Rereading it, I realised with a fair degree of horror that Maria was me. Sure, you too can see aspects of me in her; after all I tend to write - even in my attempts at fiction - about the things around me, kinda like always looking through my eyes despite there being another 'heroine' or lead character playing out a part?

The horror emerged because I understood I would be her. This despite my recent conviction that I have evolved from the creature I was. If a similar scenario played out in MY life, that's how the ending would pan out. I would "systematically" shut down all public evidence of this me, and I would abscond back into hiding, back where you didn't know of my existence and I didn't know of yours. I would abandon not just this imaginary Pepe but the lot of you?

The pattern of my life would continue to play out. It's what I do. Disappear. Go lick my wounds somewhere and then never return; this despite my wounds healing over time. I'd simply cease to exist, this person you have come to know and enjoy and some of you to love.

It's a defence mechanism brought to being so long ago there is no beginning to me and ending of it. We - this running away from - and I are one. Even what I described as the greatest love in this story, even the existence of it would not suffice to keep me around in the same space - were it to end.

I cut through my life with a very sharp knife. People left behind wonder if I was real, if my passing had been anything but an imaginary thing. Some do hurt, some hurt more than others and in the cutting, of course I too bleed. Sometimes it feels like there is no blood left in me, so acute is the severing.

Most of you probably have the odd friend or two who has hung around, despite life's ups and downs, despite emotional dramas and 'physical' disasters and other life catastrophes. I don't. At every stage in my life, I am around a set of people but then comes that point. And when it arrives - in whatever form - I abscond and leave everyone behind. Callous as it may seem to read this, it is my only buffer, my only defence against pain; despite the pain of severing being at times stronger than the pain inducing it?

I am Maria. Take me, leave me, empathise or judge me, I am she.