Who Am I to You?

I don’t usually open my laptop on the bus. The M15 Select, though a generally pleasant ride and good people-watching opportunity, has few seats that will comfortably contain a human, their laptop, and the involuntary sway of elbows that keeps in time with their clicking fingers. Besides that, typing on a laptop, on a crowded bus at 5:00 on a just-the-right kind of hot Friday, is intimidating. I feel more deeply exposed every time I catch a wandering eye land on my unpainted nails. I wonder if they are hypothesizing, imagining what sentences are forming on the page. And if they are, if the middle-aged woman in the pink dress sitting behind me whispers to her husband, “I am just positive she is writing a post for a blog about everything but love in your twenties," I want desperately to know what gave her that impression, and me away.

It is unreasonable to assume that everyone you meet will create and maintain the same opinion of you. My best friend has seen me crying on a cold-tiled kitchen floor at midnight and lying through my teeth on the wrong side of a high school fence, but she has never seen me talk about Adrienne Rich for 10 minutes. Simultaneously, thirty people, probably all now at four-year universities I couldn’t know the names of, know me only for that.

I fear this lack of continuity.

On the last day of my second semester of college in the city, I met up with some friends a couple of hours before class, in the hallway turned journalism student lounge we camped out in all year. The four of us talked of our plans for the summer and gory cartoons about cute animals with extremely bad luck, and everything seemed to be (between us) just as it had been since we’d met in a shared class the semester before. We spent over ten hours every week together— working on the student newspaper and class assignments, eating Thai food and making deli runs in between— and it made me feel like I knew the faces sitting across from me pretty well. I think that the same must have been true for them, because nothing else can explain the expression that washed over their familiar features when I accepted their offer to share a joint. Watching their eyes widen and their lips curl slightly upward, I realized that yes is the last answer any of them expected when they stealthily slipped me the clear plastic container. We smoked the whole thing just a few blocks from campus, and less than an hour later my friends and I were confusing languages we spoke for ones we did not.

I am somebody different to everyone who knows me. Because I work so tirelessly to make my every decision a reflection of both who I am and who I want to be, it is strange and sometimes frustrating to acknowledge that so many of the decisions that define me exist solely in an invisible dictionary that only I can read from cover to cover. And I can’t help but wonder, is it possible for another person to truly know us?

Nagel would say no. And though I found that his arguments felt true in my community college philosophy class, I want now to be able to forget them. I want to believe that being incapable of knowing what it is like to be a bat does not render me incapable of knowing what it is like to be any of the people I love.

I am sitting alone at a restaurant that is much too nice for my cocktail-serving salary at the corner of E 10th Street and University, and a young girl in a tie-dyed shirt just took a seat in the chair across from me. She tells me that she is selling Oreos for charity. I buy two with a five-dollar bill I found stuffed in the embarrassingly cluttered zipper pocket of my bag and ask, “How are you doing today?” She answers-- “Good”-- without looking up from her box of pre-packaged cookies that is now missing two, then sits with me in silence for another minute. Just minutes after I put my prayer to writing— “Please let that damned Nagel be wrong”— something orchestrated a scene that forced me to remember why I believed him so many years ago.

I have an inexplicable urge now, bubbling inside of me, to ask the server of few words that poured my wine if he believes that anybody truly knows him. I would ask the two girls instagram-storying aesthetically pleasing images of their (admittedly) gorgeous meal to their (probably) tens of thousands of followers, but I am stopped by the rules of interactions with strangers, which strictly prohibit asking deep questions to two friends sharing a meal. But I feel like this train of thought requires external input.

I have work in an hour, am just halfway through my second glass of sauvignon blanc, and I wonder about how to conclude this post. Am I overthinking? Isn’t it special that we can be ourselves and a thousand different people at precisely the same moment? To my friends and acquaintances and anyone who has the mind and guts to ask, I would say yes without hesitation. I would tell them that it is a beautiful thing, to have every part of yourself canonized in somebody else’s mental little black book. And I would make this declaration, not because I want to believe it, but because a part of me does-- even as I sit alone at this restaurant, unsuccessfully wishing that everyone could know me the way that I do.

Signed,

A New Romantic