The Whole of You
This past week, Nights by Frank Ocean found its way into the queue on the Bluetooth speaker. I hit, face-first, into a brick wall of nostalgia. Physically, I was in my present body, but mentally, I was sitting in the car with the one friend I had hung out with during my senior year of high school. I was in the passenger, parked at a grassy field late into a purple night. A cheap gram and icy winter air reddened my eyes. Every time I hear that song, I find myself sitting in that fabric seat. I see the browned grass through the frosty windows, I feel the bass rumble the car, and I can see his eyes through his black glasses. It took me a moment to remember his name. Our friendship didn’t last once the novelty of getting high in a sedan wore off.
Finding myself frozen eight years later from a single song got me thinking, even from a short-lived friendship, he will forever think of me and see that 17-year-old sitting in his car. He will forever think of me as a lost, little, depressed girl about to graduate high school. Even after all these years, I still see him as the 23-year-old who got high school girls stoned. I’ll see him as the 23-year-old who dated an underage girl and went to her prom.
This fleshy, somatic memory got me thinking, there are a thousand versions of me from every person that knows me. Maybe a song will come on when they’re at work and remind them of the juvenile version of me sitting in their passenger seat. Perhaps they’ll be scrolling on Netflix and scroll past my favorite movie, remembering secrets I’d told them when I was 15. Possibly a date on the calendar will pass, whether it's my birthday or a long-forgotten anniversary, when they think of me. Maybe they’ll remember how coldly I dumped them, or how much I love my birthday.
It’s a daunting thought, knowing there are books written about me that have since ended. Revisions aren’t welcome, and annotations were never assigned. What if my longest friend from elementary school to senior year, only remembers how I chose a boyfriend over seeing her until we were no longer friends? My party friends from college won’t know I eased up on drinking. Acquainted observers from my early teen years will remember the idiotic shit I spewed. My 2015 yearbook documents me in the Young Republicans Club, forever documenting a version of me that I’ve moved so far past. The dudes I hooked up with in college will forever think they were giving me the time of my life, all while I was having an internal sexuality crisis and wishing it would end.
I find it aggravating and uncomfortable sitting with the fact that I’ll never get to explain myself or provide any context. They will always have their definition of me. They have their psychoanalysis, they have their opinions, and a specific moment in time will surface when they hear my name. It’ll be me they think of, but frozen in a past version of myself. Does my name give them a stomachache? For some, I hope there’s not enough antacids in the world to settle the sourness.
It’s addicting to identify the multitude of versions that are out there and how scary that can be, but some moments are precious as they are, and don’t need more chapters to have a good story. To my best friend in middle school, I hope she remembers watching Titanic at sleepovers, obsessing over our favorite One Direction members, and watching the Justin Bieber movie premiere in theaters. My best friend from first grade might still have our red heart friendship necklace in an old box somewhere. Perhaps when she catches sight of her half, she freezes and is taken back to wearing plaid jumpers and playing with Barbies.
To you, reader, I hope I haven’t introduced a new concern to keep you up at night. It’s a sobering thought that there are differing versions of you. What I find both frustrating and freeing is that there is only one accurate copy of you. It encapsulates the entirety —your reasons, your hours in therapy, your tears, your bouts of dancing, your truth, your values, your breakup haircuts, and your doubts of faith. Literally only you can see all the revisions, all the edits, all the annotations, and all the mistakes that make up the whole of you. How special it is that the only person who truly knows you, the entirety of you, is yourself. But gosh, how terribly boring would our lives be if there were not a multitude of versions, stages, and selves?
