Her passport was a liar. It insisted, with all the ponderous authority of official ink, that Irina M.'s middle initial was for Maria. But in the pleated town by the crumpled sea, where she resided with her glorious and frequent confusions, everyone knew it stood for Mmmm.
It was the sound of her soul, a hummingbird's burr, a language of its own. A rising inflection for bewilderment (Mmmm?), a falling one for resignation (Mmmm.), and a triumphant, usually erroneous, exclamation for epiphany (Mmmm!).
Nearly every morning, Irina M. saw herself anew, thanks to the four slightly warped mirrors that dominated her bedroom. One day, she was shorter, a doll-like figure; the next, she was taller and more languid; then, for no reason at all, she was a faintly Italian sadness. She resided in this gallery of selves, in a small, peach-colored flat that carried the competing scents of eucalyptus and the burnt toast of a toaster that steadfastly refused to accept its own limitations.
She chose her clothes with the fastidious, almost feverish precision of a thwarted librarian—a librarian, that is, who had long harbored a secret desire to orchestrate some minor and utterly private scandal of her own. She favored long skirts that sighed with the color of forgotten book jackets, blouses that whispered of a long-ago gossip rather than shouting it in a brazen hue, and, most crucially, a pair of eyeglasses she did not need in the least but wore anyway, explaining—to no one in particular, but to the dust motes and the shadows—that they helped her to see thoughts more clearly.
By profession, Irina translated instruction manuals from Finnish into a language she had invented in college called Chimeric—a tongue composed of Slavic roots, a Polynesian lilt so delicate it was nearly a tic, and the musical notation of early Baroque composers. Not even her reflection, that pale double with her slightly crooked smile, spoke it, which she considered a profound relief, as she found conversation mostly intrusive.
Her routine was charmingly disheveled, a choreography of small, exquisite accidents: coffee with cinnamon at eleven, not because she liked the spice itself, but because it reminded her of her grandfather (who had once mistaken a jar of it for gunpowder and, in a moment of sublime folly, blown up his garden shed); a walk around the park at two, where she mentally critiqued the outfits of strangers as an invisible, and utterly ruthless, god of millinery; and, at night, a habit of reading precisely nine pages of any book before succumbing to sleep and dreaming of elevators that spoke in riddles—riddles about misplaced commas and the color of forgotten birthdays.
Yet despite the velvet rhythm of her days, the predictable hum of her existence, something unsewn stirred within her—a snag in the sweater of the soul, a thread pulled from the cuff of her quiet life.
It began, as life-altering notions so often do, not with a lightning bolt of theatrical proportions but with an errant drizzle of banality.
She had been in the supermarket, aisle 4B, perusing cereals with names like “Oat Nurture” and “Wheat Whisper,” names that seemed to promise a kind of bland, wholesome salvation. A woman nearby—a tall, angular creature humming something that resembled Mozart with a slight, almost imperceptible limp—turned to her companion and, in a voice that was both a conspiratorial whisper and a clarion call, delivered this singular, and perfectly Nabokovian, line:
“Are you gluten-free or just trying to be someone?”
Irina froze. She held no particular conviction regarding gluten—which, to her, was merely a sort of flour-based phantom—but the question, a shard of pure impertinence, had cracked something in her, a sudden, clean, and utterly irreversible fissure.
Trying to be someone.
What an idea. As if identity were a suit one tried on in fluorescent lighting, a garment of cheap tweed, only to return it to the bored clerk, apologizing for the armpits. The notion itself, so casual and so cruel, lingered in the air, a drop of poison in the grocery store's conditioned breath.
She stood there, her hand hovering over a box of something puffed and blatantly good for you, an artifact of manufactured virtue. Her eyes, unfocused and distant, drifted to its crinkled nutrition label, where the numbers, so precise and demanding, seemed to swim and disperse in a desperate attempt to remain unread.
It was then that a movement, a certain optical tug, claimed her peripheral vision. She glanced upward. A convex security mirror, a great glass eye, bulged from the ceiling like an indifferent moon, and in its funhouse curve, she caught a glimpse of herself: warped, miniature, absurdly upright—a doll arrested mid-sigh. The image was at once foreign and terribly familiar, as if she were seeing herself through someone else's telescope, a someone who had been watching all along.
It struck her then, and not gently, that she had no earthly idea who she was.
Was she the woman who always ordered lentil soup at the café because it felt literary? Was she the child who’d once been nicknamed “Koala” for clinging to her mother’s leg during thunderstorms? Was she her handwriting, her dreams, her online shopping cart filled with vintage typewriters and one suspiciously expensive tambourine?
These questions bloomed in her mind like fungus.
She looked away quickly, as if embarrassed to catch herself existing. The cereal box in her hand, once so innocently insipid, now seemed vaguely accusatory—its cartoon barley grains cavorting too confidently, too intact, with a kind of brazen, wholesome smugness she found utterly distasteful. She returned it to the shelf, where it nestled with a soft, final thud among its glutenous kin.
As she stood there, uncertain whether she had come for groceries or for meaning, her eyes wandered down the aisle. A man in a turquoise windbreaker examined a can of evaporated milk as though it were a moral dilemma. A child, wearing an expression of ancient grief, dropped a box of crackers, then solemnly picked it up and placed it in someone else's cart. Further along, a mature woman appeared to be speaking softly, and perhaps a bit too intimately, to a display of cucumbers.
Irina felt, not for the first time, that reality had loosened slightly. Just enough to trip on. There was something theatrical about the moment, as if everyone in the store were performing a version of themselves. Even the products seemed to lean into their roles: the grinning marmalade, the seductive olives, the stoic lentils.
Was she also performing? And if so, for whom?
A flicker of thought passed through her like static: What if the self isn’t something you find, but something you fabricate, like a tax return or a convincing British accent?
A wave of nausea rose—not from the thought, but from the odor of ripe camembert escaping the adjacent cheese counter like a ghost of poor decisions.
She pushed her cart forward with trembling ceremony, suddenly aware of how ludicrous it all was. A grown woman, uncertain of her own essence, drifting through a brightly lit emporium of edible identities: Toasted. Raw. Organic. Processed. Who among us, she mused, is not at least 12% emulsifier?
Outside, the wind was doing its usual performance—flapping awnings, chasing napkins, brushing hair the wrong way on purpose. Irina trudged home, her canvas bag sagging with groceries selected in a trance—a loaf of bread, some indecisive cheeses, and a single avocado that seemed to question its own ripeness.
She lived on the fourth floor of a building that leaned slightly to the left, perhaps in an attempt to eavesdrop on its own inhabitants—a theory Irina often shared with her neighbor, Ms. Cornwall, who never quite laughed but always nodded. The stairwell smelled faintly of thyme and distant secrets. As always, the elevator bore a sign that read “Out of Order” in four languages, only one of which actually existed.
Inside her flat, everything was precisely as she had left it: a row of ceramic teacups arranged in a Fibonacci spiral, a half-read book open on page 109 (she had been on page 109 for six months — the page now held a small indentation where her teacup liked to rest), and the soft ticking of a clock that implied time more than measured it.
She sat at her desk and stared at nothing for a professional amount of time.
Then, quite against her will, she muttered aloud: “Who am I?”
The room, not being particularly philosophical, remained silent.
She repeated it, this time with more vowels: “Whooooo... am Iiiiii?”
Still nothing. Not even from the radiator, which sometimes groaned in response to bad poetry.
She considered writing it down in one of her notebooks but found herself instead opening her laptop and typing “identity crisis, mild to moderate” into the search bar.
The results were unsatisfying: quizzes, blogs with flower headers, YouTube videos of women named Sierra who swore by turmeric and shadow work.
Irina clicked through pages of digital balm, her expression blank enough to make a wax figure jealous. Somewhere between an ad for ayahuasca retreats in upstate New York and a bullet-point list titled “10 Ways to Reconnect with Your Inner Child (Without a Lawsuit),” she began to feel that she was, indeed, slipping—not falling, but slowly unzipping at the seams.
That night she dreamt she was a shopping cart, abandoned in a parking lot, watching the sunset through the gaps in her own metal ribcage.
She woke in the morning with an ache. It was not the theatrical kind of ache that blooms in the chest, but a quieter, more insidious pressure behind the eyes, where unshed questions and unfinished sentences tend to accumulate. She lay very still, unsure whether she had merely dreamt or been visited by the dream—a subtle but crucial distinction.
Deep in her chest stirred a delicate panic, the kind that whispers rather than shouts: the fear that her life had become purely figurative, a string of metaphors stitched together to resemble meaning. That she was no longer living so much as being interpreted, and fading, slowly, into a footnote.
When she finally rose, she muttered, “Mmmm,” shuffled to the kitchen in her favorite bunny-eared slippers, and made coffee so strong it could qualify as a controlled substance.
Over the next few weeks, the sensation continued to root. The mirror reflected her face, but with a delay — as if it needed to consult archives first. She caught herself referring to herself in the third person. (Irina doesn't like that. Irina prefers plum jam.) One morning, she found herself Googling, with genuine urgency: “how to locate the soul without leaving your apartment.”
Eventually, exhausted and thin from overthinking (her cheekbones developed ideologies of their own), Irina sought counsel from Dr. Graff—a Jungian analyst with a passion for bonsai and chaotic syntax. His office smelled faintly of despair and old paperbacks left too long in a musty attic.
"Identity," he said, brushing imaginary lint from his sleeve, “is a Möbius strip dipped in cologne. We chase the self as if it were a taxi, when in fact, it is a bicycle we forgot how to ride. Do you follow?”
Irina did not. But her mind, a complex and beautiful machine, whirred, sputtered, and finally seized up. A tiny sound escaped her lips: a barely audible, thoughtful Mmmm? through her smile and a nod of academic enthusiasm.
Still unsatisfied, she tried fads: crystal therapy (she mistook a paperweight for rose quartz and carried it in her bra for a week), underwater yoga, and an immersive play in which she portrayed a woman seeking herself and was booed for being “too believable.”
And then—just as the whole tragicomedy threatened to collapse into either mysticism or a minor traffic violation—she stumbled upon her salvation in the form of a quiz. A ridiculous, digital quiz on a forgotten corner of the Internet titled:
“WHICH MINOR CHARACTER FROM A CHEKHOV PLAY ARE YOU REALLY?”
She clicked. The questions were absurd.
Do you dream in prose, poetry, or prescription instructions? Would you rather kiss a nihilist, a pastry chef, or a nihilist who moonlights as a pastry chef? How many people live inside your head, and do they pay rent?
And when she reached the end, the screen blinked, buzzed, and revealed:
YOU ARE: THE UNSEEN DOG WHO BARKS OFFSTAGE IN UNCLE VANYA. STILL HEARD. NEVER KNOWN.
Irina stared at the result. At first, she laughed. Then cried. Then hiccupped. Then laughed again.
Because it was true, somehow. She was not the ingénue, nor the tragic hero, nor the wise fool. She was the dog in the background, barking unseen—still present, still real, still heard. And with that strange consolation came a stranger peace.
She didn’t have to be someone. She only had to bark.
In the years that followed, Irina M. stopped seeking the Self as a fixed thing, and instead treated it like an opera glove: elegant, shifting, and slightly absurd. She wore her ambiguity like perfume. She still translated Finnish, but only into gibberish now, which sold surprisingly well in the states.
Her existential crisis, once a hungry wolf, became a house cat napping on her windowsill.
And when asked, as she often was by cafe philosophers and curious baristas, “Who are you really?” she would answer with a wink, a shrug, and a delighted:
“Mmmm.”
