“You look different now.” “Everybody says that” “You don’t look like you did 4 years ago” “what’s that supposed to mean?”
I reckon I understand why returning to my hometown fills me with dread, wishing this city would have isolated itself from my memory. The thoughts of seeing people from my past terrify me to a great level. It is not their souls that I fear but rather this one perception, viewpoint of me that they have. They are people from the past; in their memory, there still lingers an old version of me that I have outgrown.
Every time someone says to me “You’ve changed” or “You look different,” I feel like something inside me dies. The only thing that creeps in when these forbidden phrases are uttered is a little girl in a 16-year-old body, standing in the middle of her room searching for a manual that might give an explanation or instructions on how to shut down her inner factory for eternity.
I always wonder, what do they mean by I’ve changed? In what way? Is it the difference in the way I talk? The high-to-low-to-high-again tone when I’m talking? The way I dress myself? The gradual weight change from 4 years ago? The shape of my smile that seems like a facade or is it genuine? Just what do they mean by I’ve changed? Why do they utter these forbidden phrases and refuse to clarify themselves, ultimately leaving me with another sleepless night, reliving my most distant memories of my past?
Why do people seem so fixated, so attached to my past when I, the subject, have moved on to the present? The world has been harsh on me since oxygen entered my tiny body that weighed less than a speck of dust. The joy of youth was only a tale told by the voices around me to console my pitied soul that couldn’t live through it, so am I not allowed to experience the calmness in adulting too? Is my existence too loathly that every minor privilege is nothing but a star that only astronauts can reach, and me, a mere waste of oxygen should be admiring it in jealousy and harboring hatred in silence? Why are these people from my past — no — maybe it is not the people? It is the past itself. I never accepted it; I just pretended it never happened. Perhaps that was my mistake. To forget a thing that is embodied in me, that has been residing in me, building itself an army so massive it can make the Greeks shiver.
I don’t think I can ever see myself opening the black door, allowing all those fragments that hide behind it to make steps into my white door. The nauseating, repulsive, sickening fragments should not be remembered. I won the only battle when there exists a present full of a kaleidoscope of colors, where the mirror is not too fragile for it to break if it sees me, where warmth radiates its energy in every person that I have allowed to enter my space. This is a privilege that I cannot afford to risk, to lose it all over again — no — I would rather let my heart be torn to bits and my skin be ripped apart than let this one slip away from my grasp.
They say there are only five basic fears: extinction, mutilation, loss of autonomy, separation, and ego death. Though I would like to add one more, “You’ve changed.”
