The Day I Left Myself

How many lives can one man live before he loses the right to call any of them his own?

James Stovall is forty-two, successful, restless, and particular about one thing: his name has two l's.

Then a stranger calls him Marcus.

And James answers.

In an instant, the world begins remembering a life he never lived. A wife knows the shape of his body. A daughter calls him Daddy. His hands remember skills he never learned. His heart grieves people he has never met. And somewhere beneath it all are traces of other men-other names, other loves, other crimes, other centuries.

Each departure offers James another way to become someone else.

Each return leaves something behind.

And the consequences do not reset.

As memory begins leaking between lives, James discovers that the phenomenon may be older than he is, older than his family, perhaps older than anyone understands. What first appears to be an impossible escape becomes a reckoning with identity, race, love, power, violence, inheritance, and the people forced to keep living after someone else leaves.

Because the most dangerous question may not be:

Who could I become?

It may be:

Who is waiting for me to come back?

The Day I Left Myself is a provocative literary journey through magical realism, speculative fiction, and the hidden lives inside us all.

A Pocket Universe Adventure