coming to terms with personhood

i’m starting to think i might be a real person, sort of. i touch my face in the mirror and it doesn’t feel quite like me. i leave voicemails because texting is just too slow sometimes. i’m awful at doing my laundry until i absolutely have to and then i’ll cover my bed in piles of folded shirts and pants and lay among them like i used to lay on my parents’ bed helping my dad fold socks when i couldn’t sleep. i put way too much sugar in my coffee and listen to lo-fi radio in the mornings. the greatest thing i have ever done for myself is be gentle.

i wrote a poem once and it said you are skittish and hard to approach like cats in alleyways are hard to approach and i think about that sometimes when i begin to feel like i’m turning see-through around the edges. i know these things about myself. is that all it takes? sometimes i worry that i’m going to lose everything i’ve learned like a basket full of apples leaning too far to one side so they all come falling out and roll down the hill. i have a scar on my left wrist shaped like a tiny crescent moon and i’ve had it for as long as i can remember but i’ve never known what it’s from. my hands look like they have lived several childhoods over climbing trees and dropping hunting knives and misusing sanding belts at the worktable in the basement. when rain is coming my bones ache. when the sky is pink i always take a picture and now i have more sunset pictures than i know what to do with but each and every one of them is beautiful. i never know what to be on halloween. it is both terrifying and exciting that i might be the only person ever to know all of these tiny things about me. what if i’m only beautiful when no-one’s looking?

when i was fourteen years old i lived in a room with a girl i didn’t know down the hall from eighteen other girls i didn’t know and each of us had a corkboard. i promised every day for three months i would never touch it because i didn’t want to be anything more than a ghost haunting half a room with one dresser and one pillow and a green betta fish named harold. one day i got sick of being nothing and covered it in every scrap of paper i’d ever saved and swore up and down it didn’t mean i was finding a home inside my own skin, in the newspaper-maché guitar pick with a tiny wax bird’s nest stamped into it, in the paper crane my best friend made when they taught me how to fold them and the one thousand, one hundred and fourteen paper cranes i folded when i learned how the word loss really tasted for the first time. sometimes i think nobody will ever be interested in learning to read me like a book and i can’t tell if it feels like a secret whispered in the girl’s bathroom in fourth grade or if it scares me half to death. i cover my walls in every tangible memory and hope someone, someday, will ask me about every single one of them. this one is from the first party i ever went to. this one i found in an empty train station. this one belonged to someone i loved so deeply i still dream about him even though i don’t remember his voice anymore. i have a collection of fortune-cookie papers because it’s bad luck to throw them away. i think i might be lonely.

how do i lay claim to being someone without having a whole history in tickets and business cards and polaroids plastered on a wall like there’s red yarn connecting moments that make me who i am? am i missing something? beautiful people in beautiful movies never seem to be this un-whole in such an ugly way. why am i afraid of not being beautiful?

the body moves and i follow. the body hurts and i feel less like the one that is hurting and more like a clean-up crew. i don’t live here, i’m just renting, a foul-weather friend that keeps hand warmers in all my pockets in the winter and always puts sprinkles on my ice cream.

there’s a new decade coming. something about it feels significant, like more than just buying a new calendar from the rack at the supermarket. the urge to re-make myself comes around itching in the tips of my fingers like clockwork and once again i want to pull down everything from my walls and tear every bit of paper into shreds. maybe if i confront myself with emptiness i will have to reconcile something deep inside that will make me feel more like a somebody that matters. every new year, i start making promises like: this time i will do better. this time i will try harder. this time i will be more. i’m always so afraid that who i am will never be enough. it’s about time i look in the mirror and settle with just being. i just am. i have no other choice. i will step off the cliff of becoming this time and i will not look back.

published december 30, 2019

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