Tonight, I froze, deer-in-the-headlights style. I was having a conversation and then decided I couldn’t be having it anymore. It was impossible for me to express myself, and I knew I wasn’t going to have enough time to process it all. If I had the entire night and no writing to do, I could have finally gotten the words out, but even then, I’m not sure. No one has the patience for that, not even me.
I don’t think I did that as a child. Things have changed.
Tomorrow, when I wake up, I will inevitably feel embarrassed and confused and tell the other person that I am sorry. Right now, the words sit heavy in my gut, formlessly. There are thoughts, angry and thrashing, that will not fall out of my mouth. They won’t even pop out with force if I work and work at it.
When I was small, I got along with adults very easily. I was chatty but not too chatty and knew how to listen and respond. I was impressive. Now I am an adult, and I’m not sure who I get along with easily. It isn’t other adults.
“Just write about yourself. That’s easy,” he said.
I told him, “I don’t know how to write this. I don’t exist most of the time.”
He said, “That’s writing. Write that.”
I don’t exist most of the time. When I don’t keep an eye on myself, I find myself thinking, “I do not exist,” over and over again. I don’t know why it happens. Perhaps I’m the sorceress who has spoken it into truth, but my memory falters as soon as a moment has passed. Like it never even happened. It isn’t that I don’t want to exist, though I’ve certainly felt that way before, but just that I don’t seem to, sometimes.
Today I inserted myself into a conversation that I didn’t really need to be in, and then I didn’t have the confidence to back my presence up. I was underwater, listening to those cool girls talk. No, I was a Claymation scene, thinking in excruciating detail about how each frame should look. Yet the film, I knew, didn’t look realistic. They had to know what I was, had to know how hard I was trying. It wasn’t natural.
I have a lot of dreams about the best friends I had in high school that I don’t talk to anymore. I’m always dreaming about seeing Nari in random places, and running after her, begging her to speak with me. She never looks down. It’s like she can’t hear me at all. When I dream about Emi, we are always in her house where we spent so much time during the pandemic. She’s angry with me, and we are fighting. Loudly. Like I’ve never fought someone in real life. She’s mad at me because I don’t believe in God. I’m sorry Emi, but it’s just not right for me anymore. Sometimes I dream about people who I haven’t lost yet, as though they are ready to walk away.
I love to sing, but I can’t seem to perform solo anymore. I always forget my lyrics. I’m not sure when it started to happen, because there was a time when I was the effortless star of the show. Now in every dream I have, I’m backstage during a performance looking through the script, and I go out on the stage and have no idea what I’m doing. It’s started to come true. This might be a consequence of being asleep even when I’m awake. Sleepwalking.
I’ve been reading a lot this year, and it feels good. I feel like I’m honoring the part of me that was defined by books as a kid. I will never be able to honor the little gymnast or the scientist. But books I can handle. Is it important for us to honor our younger selves? That’s a viral sort of therapy right now, getting in touch with your inner child. I think mine never went anywhere, I’m still exactly who I’ve always been. Respectful, awkward, silly, and not quite all there. Is that a privilege?
Recently, a boy expressed feelings for me while he was drunk at a party with some of our mutual friends, telling them that I was “playing with his feelings.” I didn’t see it coming, didn’t know what it was based in. Suddenly, I was 16 again, and Jackson was asking me to homecoming the closing night of a musical we were in together and I couldn’t say no, and I knew I was going to be miserable until the dance passed. I didn’t know what was wrong with me because why couldn’t I just be happy and be his friend and not overthink it and trust that he didn’t have expectations of me. And then I was 14, and my mom and I were pulling up to Zach’s baseball game and I was having a panic attack because I knew he had a crush on me, and I couldn’t handle hearing those words from his lips because I knew I couldn’t reciprocate it, so I cried and then my mom and I left. This time when the boy got drunk and expected me to respond positively, I said no. I said, “shut that down.” I said, “he has no right.” And fuck, it felt good. He is pretending it didn’t happen, and I am letting him.
Lately, I’ve been feeling angry. I was talking to a friend about this who says that she has also gotten more confrontational. Maybe we are less afraid of other people, but I think I’m also less afraid of myself. I have a lot of opinions. Some of them I need to keep to myself, but if you catch me on the wrong day, I might tell you exactly what I think. Maybe it’s a good day when I’m being honest, I’m not sure. I told my friend, “I’m sick of people being so unaware,” and she said that her roommates grew up in households where they never cleaned a bathroom. I find that impossible to process.
When I was in elementary school, I carried around a small pink duffel bag with a pair of ballet slippers printed on it that I called my pink purse. I brought around my Easter candy in it for months before my mom found out that’s what I had in there, from the mom of a friend I showed. I never ate any of the candy – it was too beautiful and precious – but I always had it nearby. I always have books and pens and my journal with me for comfort, just like the stationary I carried in my pink purse when the candy went bad. My mom didn’t go searching through that bag, and she doesn’t search for information about my life now that I live more than a thousand miles away. Sometimes I do wish she’d look just a little bit closer, ask a few more questions.
The first time my brother and I walked into our parents’ new house, we both separately commented, “oh, our stuff is in here,” as though we didn’t remember the hours of packing, we did at the end of that summer. Our parents moved in without us when the school year started. And here were our photos on the walls, our knickknacks on the tables, our dogs in the yard. But the walls themselves… the sweet spaces of our childhood were missing. I’m not sure if I believe that houses are living, but I might believe that ours was. The structure was so much of us. The side yard where I mixed potions of leaves and berries with my best friend Abby. The walk-in closet in my bedroom that I tried to convince myself had a secret passage, the floor of that same closet where I slept for a week during the pandemic when I was at my worst. The basement where my phone calls carried upstairs through the vents, where my mom would come scold me at midnight for talking too loudly and not being in bed. That house in Colorado will never be ours again, and yet how could it possibly be anyone’s but ours? I have not stopped missing 4337, have not stopped mourning it.
I was just visiting my parents at their new place in Florida. It’s been a year and a half since the move. When I asked them if I could come home, it was the first time I called it home and meant it. Neither of them hesitated, just said that yes, I should book the flight. I felt like I was in my body, alive and real, in the days leading up to that plane ride and the days I spent with them. It felt miraculous.
I wish I could have the full picture of myself. I often wonder how other people perceive me, given how unable I am to perceive myself. What is it like to spend a short conversation with me, or an hour in silence? I’m there, with myself, all the time, but it’s like I’m never there at all.
Portrait: small blonde woman, sitting on the edge of a dorm bed, gazing out at nothing. Trees with spring flowers that hint at allergies are visible through the open window behind her. She is stuck. Deer-in-the-headlights style.