When I think about high school, I first think about gum packages. Gum was a commodity, I guess, in a time when we didn’t really have anything else. My best friend and I used to always carry around an empty package in our purses – “sorry, all out!” – secretly harboring the real one right below the surface so we didn’t have to share with just anyone. Going through the false motions of opening the container we already knew didn’t contain anything at all would still allow people to think that we were nice and, to me, that was the most important commodity of all – keeping up the illusion of being kind.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, lately – been thinking about if I am a good person, a bad one, a selfish one, someone I am proud of. I don’t know if hoarding gum 15 years ago counts toward making me an unkind human, but I do know it doesn’t make me feel good. There’s a lot of things about my past that don’t make me feel good. For a long time, I sat in that discomfort – bathed in it, felt it on my skin every day. Someone I’ve shared more of my experiences with than others wrote me a birthday card this year that said to never be ashamed of who I had been because it’s made me who I am now. I’d pretty much come to the same conclusion myself after years of therapy, but still — it was nice to be seen, really seen, by someone else.
I’m reading a book and I can’t quite figure out the thesis – sometimes I think I am dumber than I used to be in high school. The paragraph that’s stuck with me, though, is about how some people are fated to share their lives, share their art, share their souls. They walk around naked because they are destined to expose themselves. Others, they wouldn’t know how to take their clothes off if they tried. I can’t quite figure out which type of person I am — I write about my entire life on the Internet, but I don’t feel known by that many people. I saw a tweet once that said the secret to not letting people know anything about you is actually to overshare everything surface level about yourself, almost to an obscene level, so that people have the illusion of knowing you, but it never goes too deep and I was horrified, truly, that I do this.
Maybe, actually, that tweet is the thesis of the book.
I wrote part of this in Australia, on a flight to Brisbane. I wrote another part in my head, on a walk around my neighborhood after I FaceTimed Zach and he said “Why are you crying?” and I said “I’m not” and he said “But I can see the tears on your face” and then I felt my cheeks, surprised by the wetness that came away on my fingers. I wrote the rest at a bar in Bushwick, killing time before another date. I should be writing other things, I should be doing other things, but instead, in multiple places across the entire fucking globe, I’ve been doing this, wandering and writing and wasting time, thinking about high school, thinking about gum.
In college, I was in a sorority and if you were too drunk or too loud or too much at an event, the sober monitor would come up to you and hand you a stick of gum. It was a quiet signal to turn it down, get it together, be different, be smaller, be better. It only happened to me once, but when she handed me the gum, I forgot it was a sign. Instead, I was delighted at being given the gum, once such a commodity, just saying “thank you, thank you, thank you!” over and over again as I chewed, still being too much.
On the flight to Brisbane, I started thinking about pain – not my pain, just everyone’s in general. I do this sometimes when I am sad, try to heal the hole in my heart by thinking about other people’s problems. It usually just makes me feel worse, like I am stealing false emotions, like I am, once again, operating only under the illusion of being kind.
I didn’t want to make a lot of noise, so I ripped all my fake nails off on the flight so I could type that sentence without the pitter patter of false plastic on a screen and I felt bad for the guy sitting next to me, watching me do that, just like I had felt bad about the incessant tapping in the first place. But, when I glanced over at him, he wasn’t paying any attention to me at all – he was sketching a house, making his own art, listening to a podcast about Jesus.
His sketch wasn’t very good, but I don’t feel like this essay is, either.
Sometimes, I feel like my writing doesn’t contain anything at all.
I hate wearing fake nails, but I hate getting my nails done even more. I sit through the uncomfortableness because I like to appear made up, professional, put together (and, wonder, always, if this makes me shallow). When I was ripping them off on the flight, I was thinking about the first manicure and pedicure I ever had. The woman was telling me about how she once met the singer of Third Eye Blind at a bar and he wanted her to go home with him, but he was so fucked up that she didn’t think it was really him and said no. Later, she looked him up and realized it was him and thought, “I wonder if I should have gone.” Her and the other women in the salon discussed the implications of this for the rest of the time she painted my toenails. I stayed silent – I was silent a lot back then.
A few weeks after that, the kids of one of the women who had been there were in an accident. They’d been playing with a gun and one of them accidentally shot their sibling to death. I think about that every time someone touches my feet, everytime someone does my nails, everytime I hear the opening chords of “Motorcycle Drive By.”
That’s not my story to tell and I feel bad about telling it. When I was in Australia, I read books, lots of books, on the plane, by the pool, falling asleep to the sounds of animals I didn’t know. One of them was about a writer who mined stories off her friends without asking. Conversations would occur and, later, her friends would see their words, their experiences, in her work – their lives on paper, written in a more contextual, more beautiful prose, but their narratives, nonetheless.
I worry I do that – mine my experiences with others into something that could maybe be called art. But, before I left for Australia, I got drinks with an ex, the one I used to write about a lot, the one I hadn’t seen in five years. I asked him, for the first time, how he felt about that – me putting our relationship issues in writing for others to see – and he told me that he was on a date once where exes came up and he mentioned my writing, my inclusions of him. The next day, his date text him asking to read one of my pieces and I thought that was hilarious. There’s a snapshot in my mind of that night now, the two of us laughing on bar stools about the pain of the past and it’s funny, I guess, how much time really does change everything.
Being in Australia made me feel like time was fake. I was in the future and everyone I knew and loved was behind me, living a day I already had experienced. When I would check my clock to see where we all were in the world, the hole in my heart would rip open slightly when I would see it was night time in America, but I don’t really want to tell anyone why.
I guess that’s what I mean about not being known — I’ll tell you I’m crying, I’ll write it into a funny story, but I won’t tell you what I’m crying about. It’s easier to just write about gum instead.
At my birthday party this year, I stayed out until 6 am. Time felt fake under the club lights there, too. Once, hours in, I walked out of the bathroom and couldn’t find my friends, but I could feel the lights and the sounds pulsing through me and I thought, “Maybe I can just stay here forever” and I don’t know how long I was there by myself, dancing to house music surrounded by strangers, but it could have been seconds or minutes or hours and then, suddenly, I was with my friends again and one of them offered me some gum and my first thought was not that they were offering me a kindness — my first thought was that I was too drunk or too loud or too much or too anything. My first thought was that I needed to turn it down, get it together, be different, be smaller, be better.
Funny, I guess, how it all stays with you.
While we were at drinks, I told my ex that I think I am done writing about him, but maybe that isn’t true because he’s mentioned in this essay. I’ve been re-reading my old journals and when I flipped open to a random page, the first sentence I read was “I do not want to lose him, but I do wonder how long it will take to lose myself.” I hadn’t written it about him, but I probably could have. I probably could have written that about a lot of people I’ve dated and I don’t know how I expect people to know me when, back then, I couldn’t even claim to know myself. When I saw the words, though, I wondered if, in five years, the person I had written it about would someday sit across from me on a bar stool and we’d be laughing together at all the ways we accidentally shot each other in the heart.
When I started this essay on the flight to Brisbane, I thought I knew how it was going to end. Before I left, I had framed that birthday card and hung it on my gallery wall — no one else would ever realize there was writing underneath, but on days I was feeling unknown, I knew I’d be able to look at it, remembering the message on the back that made me feel so seen. There was something there to tie this all together, I knew it, but at the bar this weekend, waiting for a date to begin, I was struggling trying to type my whisps of thoughts into an actual metaphor. I was staring blankly at my iPad when the drunk man on the bar stool next to me closed out his tab. Before he got up, he tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I had a stick of gum.
From my purse, I pulled out a full pack.