It was the biggest lie they ever told me.

That I would come to understand who I was only in adulthood. That sixteen was too young to know anything. Love was never love and identity was always a phase and nothing was allowed to be anything legitimate. Not really, and neither were we.

WHO YOU WERE

I am thinking of this because of a speech I watched where someone spoke of how we all knew exactly who we were when we were children and then things got in the way.

The world changed us.

When I was little, I used to sing on the sidewalks and paint sunflowers on my arms and run around under pink taffy skies. When I was a teenager I used to hop fences in my vans and ripped jeans because the boys were too scared. I rambled on about astronomy and Plato and god knows what and I wore outrageous things. I was outrageous. We all were.

And as a college kid, I used to post whatever I wanted on this blog without thinking twice about it. I was proud of it. And then, I sort of stopped. I began to think too much about it. I began to feel embarrassed, making fun of my own ideas and not saying what I wanted to because no one else I know does this and maybe it is weird. Maybe having a personal blog is a thing I need to stop now that I have a different life.

And then I watched that speech. I heard this woman talk about how we knew who were were so young and then we slowly began to quiet down those flames that were raging in our bellies. About what a mistake that is. I heard that and I wanted to do nothing but write. About anything, something, just one thing.

This is what I got.

LIMINAL SPACES

I was thinking of an old post that I wrote about liminality back in December.

December is a liminal month on it’s own, serving as the footbridge from one year to the next. And I was crossing into a new year, but also into a new life. I was floating through the liminal space between two worlds—college and real adulthood. California and New York. The kitty pool and the ocean. I remember knowing this even at the time. I could feel it, the suspension, the strangeness of knowing that for these few moments, you belong to neither this world nor the next. You are in limbo, caught choking on both nostalgia for what is slipping away and anticipation for what is to come.

The weeks were elusive and dreamlike. They melted and froze and melted again. Time felt like a hoax. I remember that.

I remember it in hazy hues. Those months come to me like fever dreams, waking me up in the middle of the night, reminding me of the journey I took to get here. It was so violent and never ending at the time and now it so quiet. I am seeing the whole thing like you see something underwater. Blurry and full of white noise and all in slow motion. I spent so long in that liminality, so long in that space of waiting for something else to begin, that I barely realized I have long since escaped it.

I was riding the train the other day when it hit me. I saw my reflection in the train car window and saw someone else. Like someone I remember wanting to be.

MOMENTS OF RECOGNITION

I think that someone, at the very root, was born at the dinner parties and birthday gatherings and barbecues of my youth in Southern California.

It was there, as a little girl, that I was surrounded by very glamorous aunts. My mother and her sisters were beautiful and stylish with designer shoes and stunning outfits and an alluring way of saying things that I always wanted to emulate. They all had wild, thick hair, like my own, that they would toss as they laughed. And those laughs, those glances and smiles, they held secrets. They seemed to know things, and I wanted to know things too. They were womanhood, personified. They scared me and they amazed me and I wanted to be just like them.

I was very young and very sweet and it all seemed a very long way off.

And then, I looked in the train window that day and there they were. I saw their faces in my own. Their noses, their hair, their sunglasses all wound up in my own wild hair. I saw all of these pieces of them, but they were my own. It was this moment of realizing that I am no longer a college kid waiting for life to truly begin. I escaped the labyrinth of liminality. I have an apartment and a job and I met someone who makes my world spin. I know my neighbors. We talk about the weather. I have tied myself to this city with double knots.

I am now in my own version of the world my mother and my aunts existed in, and far from the one that I was watching them from, hiding candy in my pockets.

THE LEVELS OF LIMINALITY

Though I suppose I did not escape the labyrinth of liminality, as much as I did a labyrinth.

There are levels to liminality. I think of it all like a building.

Each floor is a stage of your life where you dilly dally around for a while until it is time to go. Then, you get into the elevator and the doors close on that world as you feel the anxiety and excitement of being hurdled up into a brand new one. There is a moment where you are between floors, between lives, between selves. You can hear yourself think. Time stops. And then the doors open and it is all up to you again.

For a long while you are simply to entrenched in the foreignness of that new floor. You are still freshly who you were one floor ago, one world ago. And so for a long time, you wander with wide eyes and open hands. That was me when I arrived in New York. I had not been changed yet. I was a true transplant, trying to stick my roots into the ground before they had time to really latch.

And then time passes. Time passes and you begin to know your way around. You make a new life for yourself and you don’t even fully realize it until one day when you are sitting on a train in that new world and you just feel it—the chasm that now exists between who you were and who you have since begun to be.

I feel that chasm like you feel that twirly feeling in your stomach when you look down from a great height. There are moments where that building, the one I think of my life as, turns to glass and I can see everything all at once. I can stand on the floor that I am on and look down at 22 years of life, playing out before me. I can see worlds I have long since walked away from, have long since ceased to belong to, but they are still there.

They are still mine. They are running like old films, over and over again in my mind, usually of the stage I most recently left.

And so, like a computer backing up recent downloads, scenes of my life in California play themselves out on the floor just beneath me. My hands are pressed to the glass and I am watching her. I am watching her do all of these things. She cannot see me, she cannot hear me. She does not know that I am here. I am but a collection of ideas to her, ones she is busy plotting and scheming to bring to life. But I am with her. I am her. I am that feeling in her gut. The little flame. The one the person in the aforementioned speech said to never let go out.

I sometimes imagine time as folded, where dimensions dip into one another, allowing past and present to intermingle for whole moments at a time. Maybe our elderly selves visit us in dreams and in waking and tell us things we need to know. Maybe that is that feeling, the one I can never put a finger on, the one that sits at the base of my being and tells me what to do. I have always had it.

Maybe my future self is pressing her own hands to a sheet of glass, watching me, trying to tell me things I cannot hear, but can feel.

I think I believe in that.

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