So do I.
I thought my sister was consigned to the memory hole, that she’d been erased from the world as a consequence of my actions. But I’ve come to realize recently that even the things in the memory hole still existed. They still happened. Just because Big Brother tried to make them disappear forever didn’t mean they never existed in the first place, no matter how well-executed the erasure. If there’s one Winston who defies Big Brother and fails, there will be another who succeeds. Someone has to destroy and re-create the documents. Someone knows. Someone remembers.
Everyone thinks “poor kid.” Everyone thinks “Thank God that’s not me.” But you know what? I’m okay being me. No matter how bad it’s been for me, it’s been worse for someone else.
This essay is supposed to prepare me to think about myself critically, a way of examining myself in preparation for writing a college application. So I want to say this: Any college that wants to hear about something that happened when I was four years old—any person who wants to hear about it—is crazy. It’s impossible to apply autocriticism or self-reflection to something so remote.
And it’s also ridiculous to expect teenagers to have a “significant event” in their lives that is even worth writing an essay about. Some will, but most won’t. And as a consequence, your end result is essays that inflate the common and the mundane into the spectacular and the unexpected, all to meet the criteria of an assignment whose value is dubious at best. It’s encouraging solipsism of the worst sort. Better off asking us to describe some significant world event and how we responded to it. Or some small event that no one cares about, but we do, and then explain why.
Because here’s something else that I’ve learned—rarely do the “significant events” in our lives change us. At least, not in any way we want. The people who suffer tragedy and go on to greatness? They’re the stuff of movies and TV shows and books, and—only very rarely—real life. Most of us just go on, the walking wounded, dealing with our lives. This doesn’t make us bad—it just means we’re not superheroes. It means we’re just people, like everyone else.
But I’ll bite. I’ll play.
In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, I met someone new in my neighborhood: Aneesa. We quickly became friends. We bonded over a mutual sense of humor and a love of pizza, yes, but I think we bonded more over our differences than our similarities. I’m not religious, but I’m told that’s God’s point. If so, I applaud God’s thinking.
She was funny and quick-witted, and she cared for me in a way I wasn’t used to, a way I couldn’t really process. She laughed at my jokes even when they weren’t funny. She listened to me and didn’t try to fix things. She was open and kind, and when she raised her eyebrows, I thought my heart would stop beating in my chest. Unconditional acceptance. She wasn’t afraid to look at the darkness and keep smiling. Unlike everyone else, who either looked and then looked away, ashamed, or gawked.
But more important, she was different. She was like no one I’d ever met before. And, to my shame, I allowed that to consume me. I was so used to being an outcast that I thought only of what made her different, too, thinking that this bonded us, that I couldn’t possibly have anything to offer other than commiseration.
And I fell in love with her. Far too hard and far too soon. And I just assumed that the feelings were reciprocated. Not really because of anything she did—though I convinced myself certain things mattered more than they did—but mostly because that’s what I needed in the moment.
I treated her like a remedy, not a person.
Someone told me at one point that Aneesa had put me in the friend-zone. Which everyone knows is a horrible place to be. If you’ve ever seen the old movie Superman II (from 1980, and if you haven’t, you should—the Donner Cut is particularly righteous), you can imagine the friend-zone as being like the prison where they keep the villains from Superman’s home planet—a flat, featureless mirror-like surface that spins and wheels through space for eternity, with no way out. All you can do from there is look out into the universe and see what you don’t have, what you can’t have, what you’ll never have.
She and I built something together, something not just cool, but also worthwhile. Productive, even. And fun. And I’m not going to let it go away just because of the past. I won’t let history topple tomorrow.
So, what is my significant event? I’m getting there. All of this critical self-reflection takes time. If it were quick and easy, what would be the point?
We—all of us—keep pigeonholing each other. Muslim girl eats pizza is somehow more compelling than girl eats pizza. Or just person eats pizza. Harry Potter is the boy who lived, and I’m the boy who killed. Aneesa wears hijab and everyone thinks they know who and what she is. Friend-zoned is worse than boyfriend.
And it’s all crap. Because I’m also the boy who invents pizzas, and she’s funny and fun and plays a mean oboe and—despite what some idiots say—is not out to destroy America.
I realize now that she made it possible for me not to think about other things, things I’m not going to talk about in this essay because they’re none of your business. They’re no one’s business. And that, truly, is the major life-changing moment I’m writing about. My epiphany, if you will.
Some things are private. And they should stay that way and they get to stay that way. This isn’t preschool; I don’t have to share.
I don’t have to tell unless I want to. My “significant events” can be personal and hidden and they’re still real. They still count, even if I don’t perform an autopsy on them in order to please you or some college admissions board. They’re still mine and they still matter, even if I’m not willing to take out my Aztec ceremonial mosaic-handled knife and sacrifice them on the altar of the almighty God of Grades.
The word autopsy is just a letter-swap away from being auto-spy. I’m not going to spy on myself for you. Big Brother has enough Thought Police. He doesn’t need me informing on myself.
That’s what I learned: People can wonder and ponder and imagine all they want. But their curiosity does not entitle them to enter my world.
One other thing I learned, and this one may be even more important: The key word in “friend-zone” is friend.
LOWE COUNTY TIMES
Boy, 4, Shoots, Kills Infant Sister