The Two of You

The Two of You

“When you understand,” Brandy says, “that what you’re telling is just a story. It isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan,” Brandy says, “then we’ll figure out who you’re going to be.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

 At some point in your life, you’re confronted with a different version of yourself that will no longer mesh with the version you’ve become. You’re incompatible with a younger version of you.

You sit side by side with yourself for many years, sharing good food and drink at the table and using that version of you as a shield when old familiars come to visit.

But when they leave, you step out from behind his shadow and put him back in the closet.

You travel with him in case you need him, but you do so less and less as time goes by.

Longer stretches go by without him by your side, until one day you’re caught without him, and you suddenly must explain that split to people who have only ever known the first version of you.

But where to start?

You first started to break away from the version of you who grew up in Sunday school when you met skepticism, but that was just a short field of exploration around the ideology you were given.

You had not developed any elasticity yet, and nobody could tell you apart for many years. Sometimes you hoped they never would.

In some ways it was easy to be one whole person when you were at home and surrounded by people who thought and acted the same way, but in meeting other people, it tended to render you into two separate entities.

You grew up seeing this on television with your superheroes. Wonder Woman, Superman, The Incredible Hulk. They all had two lives, so your two lives weren’t abnormal, you just had to hide one version of yourself.

For the greater good of humanity, of course.

At least that’s what you told yourself to get by.

At some point fully rendered, you never left home without the other version of yourself. You never know who you will meet. Language is the gateway to adventure, and you explore the world, at first, through the written word.

Books are the first time you really leave home. In some ways, they’re the best way to leave home. It’s the first time you can really travel as the person you are becoming without taking the other version of yourself along.

Books are innocuous, way more so than music, which comes from the devil according to those who would protect you from such horrors. So, you dive into books and discover that everything is so much bigger on the inside of the page.

The world expands to horizons that were never visible to you before. Ideas begin to form and to gel and to take root inside your brain, and you don’t share those things with the other version of you, because if you do, they may discover something about the you you’re becoming that would greatly displease them.

One of you is a people pleaser. The other is an avoidance strategy. This works for a very long time.

Until it doesn’t.

First books, and then larger fields to play in, like history.

So much of history was re-written for you so you could be content in a cocoon of belief and behavior. When you stepped into the written word, through the doorway that books created, you saw the world as it was meant to be understood, and it took your breath away.

But how do you keep this beautiful new world to yourself? How do you not tell this to the other version of you and become a whole person striding towards that gorgeous sunrise?

You don’t. I didn’t. You keep him in the dark, literally. Like not inviting him to know or see any of this, because innocence is so very precious and costly, and protect it you must. But how very, terribly sad for that first you.

As you move further away from him, you start to resent him. You want to bury him away somewhere, but you still need him, and needing him hurts. It hurts very much at first and then not as much later. It becomes easier to keep him around for those times you need him and then to stash him away.

But if he’s around, you can’t really be yourself. He will always come out with his lies and his small worldview. His dogma embarrasses you like that child of yours who is so close to that other version of yourself you are tempted to tell them that you only keep that version of yourself around for protection.
But protection for what? They can’t hurt you. They can’t take anything away from you. 

But they are a buffer for unpleasant things you don’t want to spoil on the new you.

You start to go out more and more without them. You take them out of the closet less and less. One day, you go to the closet to remind yourself of who you used to be, and the old you is not there anymore. He’d been fading for a while now, but it was too dark in there to see.

You couldn’t feel the loss of something that has been gone a long time, so you moved around the world you’re more comfortable with on your own.

And now that two of you are gone, and you are all that is left, and what was before is just a watermark down at ground level where people don’t dare to look.

It’s been a few weeks now. Or maybe years. You don’t really know anymore. On days like today, you think about him, and a small part of you maybe feels sorry for that other you. It wonders what it would’ve been like to just stay there forever.

But you don’t wonder that, because you know where there was. You remember, keenly, the pain and trauma that he withstood, because it coaxed this you out into the open, and you never really looked back.

Except on days like today.