Music for your reading ☆*️ᥫ᭡

I’m writing to you from the other side of things. Hello. How are you? Have you been feeling well? Refreshed. It’s a new year, and the portal is opening just wide enough for me to slip through. I forgot who I was, or at least what I could be.

I am a girl. A young girl. I always have been. Was that? I remember feeling small—steps patting the ground, socks on all the time. I had long, fluffy hair. Do you remember that? The songs I sang to myself. The music. The love in my eyes.

I am young and small and fluffy. Baby fluff in my cheeks, hips, all the soft places. I’m not a smiler yet. That comes later. I’m not too loud either. That comes eventually.

I look at you with, I can’t remember.

I am different. I became different a while ago. It’s never all at once. I was obsessed with games where you could customize yourself. Character skins, dress-up games. Sims wardrobes for each phase of life. Did I think someone would press something and I’d wake up one day changed? I must have.

This body is a canvas. I’m unfamiliar with it. I had this idea that I needed to fix myself. This happens when I feel out of depth. I just needed to remember that I have changed, and maybe all I need are different things. That may be I am not in a lack of homeostasis. I can’t rehabilitate into what I was. I am different.

The path forward isn’t really a path. It’s a room. The room of my old life is connected through a window. I like to watch her sometimes. What she does, cares about, cries over. So much has happened there that I can’t remember. I watch, and it is a movie called My Memory. She looks at me like I am a stranger.

This room, called My Life Now, feels empty. It’s less a fault of my own and more a lack of initiation. When did I start the last room? How? I don’t remember. There were expectations, small rituals to help the process. A trial run the year before under the illusion of a new life. You’ll expand into the next room. You’ll continue on the old drawing. Untrue. You continue by leaving it behind because it never quite fits.

I remember decorating the first room that was mine. When we moved into our apartment, the one we have now, it was empty. I didn’t have my own bed; I borrowed my roommate’s spare mattress until my bed frame came in the mail. The mattress was soon to follow. The first nights of sleeping in the middle of the room felt hollow but true. I was creating a sense of routine, settling into the space. I spent my days deep cleaning until it felt good to breathe, felt safe to touch. Maybe when I fall in love again, I’ll do the same thing—clean the gunk of the past from my eyes until it feels good to breathe and safe to touch.

My bed sat in the middle of the room at first. Nothing else lived there except for plastic totes filled with everything I owned that couldn’t be in the kitchen. I had hung some clothes in the closet (a great feeling). I felt a sense of being at home. I also felt like an island. Something was wrong.

When my other roommate moved in, I copied her floor plan, pushing my bed into the corner, my desk soon sitting at its feet. The space opened, the room changed. I could imagine shelves and bookcases. I would paint pieces to fill my white walls. A pink bean bag would come in the mail because I had made a Pinterest board with rooms that all had bedroom chairs, so I wanted one. I wanted to be a bedroom chair person. After a year, it became a fluffy ottoman.

This room became my room. My old room grew up and became my mother’s. You only ever have one room at a time.

This new room of My Life Now needed deep cleaning. Years of internal truths and programming to sweep. Clearing out the boxes of old dreams, thumbing through the CD collection of songs I can’t listen to. There’s this quote I read once about people having the same music taste as their teenage self for the rest of their lives. I thought that person was wrong when I read it. I can’t believe teenage me was right.

I’ve been cleaning for a year, scrubbing the floors of my subconscious with bleach, trying to erase myself. I thought that was what I had to do, to disappear to make room for this new version of me to emerge. I cannot materialize from nothing. I have already done that by being alive. I exist in myself right now. I am different, but I am still here, whatever it is I am. When my bleaching didn’t work, I collapsed and gave up on cleaning for a while. I figured, what was the use? Make do with the space you have. Good enough, clean enough. Work with the old habits, old thought patterns. Some things just needed a spot to stay. Some stains were just part of the room. Some boxes were never mine to keep. Shuffling and reshuffling and more shuffling.

I became dizzy and lay on the floor, staring at the blank white ceiling. How much of this stuff was really mine? Was any of it? No, not at all. It all shifts. Things would leave and return. I was Belle, and the room was made up of talking, dancing furniture. My life was alive and changing like I was. I could watch the whirlwind in horror or awe. I chose awe. The parade of my life, as it once was, marched its way out.

I’m not left in an empty room. I have my boxes, and I know I will need to order a bed. A desk. Make paintings for the wall. Or maybe I’ll buy posters. I’ve never done posters. I’ll see where life could take me. The world is an oyster, and myself a pearl forming slowly inside.

I miss the old way. I missed it. But then I watched and remembered it’s not mine anymore. And I see you laughing and crying and smiling. I am so proud of you for living your life. I should go live mine too.

I’ll see you on the other side.

– The Future.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit catharaxia.substack.com/subscribe