When you realize pieces of your life aren’t ever fully yours, you may begin to feel resentful. For example, when you have to share the telling of a particularly gruesome story with a cadre of people, your retelling, or even your right to have been there, diminishes.
An old boyfriend told me his favorite part of throwing parties was the morning after, when the roommates and their girlfriends would wake up slightly hung over, and in rumpled hair, t-shirts, and boxers, step into the back yard to survey the damage. Drinking a leftover beer, they’d begin a slow but steady re-hash of the night before.
I had been that girl, that t-shirt, that back yard, that same, sordid fire-pit. But my version kept getting softer and softer until, layer by layer, it just turned invisible. In fact, I don’t even remember many of the stories that didn’t turn into a shared mythos. If I discovered the buckets of paint in the shed and proposed the idea of finger-painting the kitchen cupboards, no one remembers, not even me. It was my idea, though, to write secret messages about the coffee mugs. To trace silhouettes of people caught on the wall from the street lamps. The next morning, the details didn’t stand up against the shared mythos at work.
Isn’t the point of the debauchery to be seen? To be remembered? Who are you, when you’re only the girl who partakes with a half-heart? “Where is the rest of your heart?” I ask myself in the shower. I don’t have a solid answer for this. The only time I feel so whole I could lick the air and swear I taste the garden, is maybe when I’m allowed to laugh the loudest. I know no one gives us that right. I know we are supposed to carve it for ourselves. Why, year after year, do I keep forgetting how? Why do I keep returning to the same chorus I hear from every story in my life, “So-and-so told it better. You had to be there.” Sometimes I was there, and it still doesn’t feel like me.
An old boyfriend told me his favorite part of throwing parties was the morning after, when the roommates and their girlfriends would wake up slightly hung over, and in rumpled hair, t-shirts, and boxers, step into the back yard to survey the damage. Drinking a leftover beer, they’d begin a slow but steady re-hash of the night before.
I had been that girl, that t-shirt, that back yard, that same, sordid fire-pit. But my version kept getting softer and softer until, layer by layer, it just turned invisible. In fact, I don’t even remember many of the stories that didn’t turn into a shared mythos. If I discovered the buckets of paint in the shed and proposed the idea of finger-painting the kitchen cupboards, no one remembers, not even me. It was my idea, though, to write secret messages about the coffee mugs. To trace silhouettes of people caught on the wall from the street lamps. The next morning, the details didn’t stand up against the shared mythos at work.
Isn’t the point of the debauchery to be seen? To be remembered? Who are you, when you’re only the girl who partakes with a half-heart? “Where is the rest of your heart?” I ask myself in the shower. I don’t have a solid answer for this. The only time I feel so whole I could lick the air and swear I taste the garden, is maybe when I’m allowed to laugh the loudest. I know no one gives us that right. I know we are supposed to carve it for ourselves. Why, year after year, do I keep forgetting how? Why do I keep returning to the same chorus I hear from every story in my life, “So-and-so told it better. You had to be there.” Sometimes I was there, and it still doesn’t feel like me.
