whoami

published: 2018-05-26

whoami. The most existiental of all the UNIX commands, and yet the most pointless. I can just look to the left of where my cursor is blinking, and there you have it- username@hostname, plain as day.

So whoami? I write my documents in /home/vanevander/, yet whoami says root. I tell GNURoot Debian my name, and yet it still addresses me as "root".

Much like real life, I suppose. I once tried giving people my preferred name, thought I'd start testing a potential post-transition future. (I identified as nonbinary.) And they shrugged it off and rolled their eyes and called me weird and kept calling me by my birth name.

whoami?

Fi, the terminal says. Another night of disassociating into whatever video game I played last, the room spinning so fast that I press my arms into the mattress and close my eyes and pray to deities I know in the back of my mind are nonexistent that the planet won't reject me and eject me into orbit to choke and die alone amid the trash of humanity.

whoami?

Luci, whatever chat application I'm using with Matrix at the time says. Unless it's one I frequently use Bitmask on, in which case it says Serlis. But Luci- a fragment of a time I thought I knew what the hell was going on with my gender identity. A fragment of a time where I was closest to the Patron-Saint of Productivity, where I almost had a true role model I wasn't just sucking up to.

whoami?

Medusa, my computer says. The one who never sleeps, the one whose desire has faded into the night, now only longing to turn away from the world and self-seclude in a voluntary secular monastery of her own creation. Waiting for the object of her death with open arms and a throat ready to giggle at the drop of a single ragged feather.

whoami?

Cloud, my phone says. The primordial god of chaos. An echo of the last night I spent in a hotel, the last night before I moved into my current house. So many hours wasted chasing after so many codes that would never work, only to be done in in a second in a bleary night in April a few months later.

But I've been forgetting the most important question of all.

whoareyou?