You are not a person of your own, you’re just an earthen pot of memories. Of words that are said to you. Of looks and moments that orchestrate to sculpt you into an illusion of something permanent and stable. You’re a reservoir of the scents of people you love, their mannerisms, their cues. The only trick that makes you seem like an independent entity from what happens around you is the perception of you that they hold in their eyes.
Of course you would like to believe you’re a person. That everything about you, from head to toe, is your very own and detachable from the people who have loved you and left you, made you laugh and made you howl. But you still subliminally define yourself as everything you feel. You fill your emptiness with pieces of people who tickle your fancy. When you look in the mirror, you see the eyes of your father and the smile of your mother, the scoff of your brother and the blink of your sister. Your tone has your best friend embedded in it, your walk has started resembling your favourite neighbour. Even your jokes are not your own.
The song you hum tonight is the favourite of your beloved, whether they know or not. The way you write comes from the first bench partner you had in primary school. Your grand-father held your hand and taught you to walk in a straight line. You learned jealousy from the first person you fell in love with as a middle-schooler and you learned sadness from your sister crying helplessly in your arms at 2am when no one could hear her. You carry now a part of that stranger you had a drunken two hour conversation on a Thursday night. They carry yours. That one date you never saw again, his post-giggle snorts rubbed off on you. Your grandmother taught you everything you needed to know about unconditional love and how it is not a myth. It is real. And that you deserve it no matter what.
So today as I am writing, I wear my roommate’s earrings and my mother’s kurti. My pouch has keychains from my best friend and the lipstick shade I chose was recommended by my aunt. I use phrases that I have picked up from my girl friends sitting in the hallway laughing. We have shared dreams and shared fears. We are each other, through and through.
Every moment you interact with someone, you merge into one with them. In some capacity at-least.
Isn’t what we are all about? Isn’t that our purpose? To exist in a constant state of borrowed-being from one other, from our enemies to our lovers.
Life would be so different, so pragmatic, if we really were just our own. We wouldn’t stay up at midnight to host the ever so swallowing and all-consuming mortal need to borrow, to find pieces and people to make our own, to make our homes in them, and let them be unpaid tenants in ours. But you’re not your own. You’re just a dissolvable, washable empty canvas always in search for making your hollowness less obvious, That’s both your good and bad news.
So just be. Feel. Do. Celebrate your untraceable and undefined beginning, your untraceable and undefined end.
You are an earthen pot of emotions. Of people.
And when all of that is taken away from you, you won’t remain. You will simply become mud again.