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Who am I? Your guess is as good as mine, really.Am I simply the young hardware store cashier with blue hair and long roots who sometimes wears bright red lipstick (which, by French fashion standards, is more of a warm red than a cool tone red and doesn’t match my skin tone)? Maybe I’m not all that complex; it’s possible that my life really isn’t much more intricate than what customers see when I scan the barcodes on their oak two-by-fours in their carts and take their dirty coupons in my thin white hand with a smile. For the most part, I don’t speak to my coworkers unless spoken to, and as far as customers go, I am on autopilot: “Hello, you find everything okay?” If the customer only sets one or two items on my counter (usually a soap-box-sized carton of screws or some small random piece of plumbing piping): “Would you like a bag for that?” (It makes me happy when they say no; plastic bags are horrible for the environment.) The customers usually insert their cards into the card reader on my counter and then stare at me in their idle, waiting for me to perform some magical cashier trick on the computer, unaware until I peep up and tell them so that the card reader machine is waiting on them to push a button or enter a credit pin number. Maybe I’m just as dull and reticent when I go home after nine hours of, “Hello, you find everything okay? Would you like a bag for that? It’s gonna have you select debit or credit--here’s your receipt, and here is a coupon for five dollars off a purchase of twenty-five or more,” as I am when I take my lunch breaks alone in the quiet of the training room, reading some overdue library book and pinching small bite-sized pieces off of a gas station brownie to nibble at instead of taking direct bites out of the suspiciously oily pastry.Maybe I’m actually the notions inside my head. Maybe I am just a tool that they use to be heard and make their dreams a reality; maybe I’m not my body or job. Maybe I am a successful, peaceful, light-hearted artist and author--I just haven’t published my novels or hosted any successful art shows yet. Or any art shows, for that matter.Perhaps I’m my mother’s daughter; stubborn and crazy, with an invariably rotten attitude and enough financial issues for myself and all of my fellow cashiers to build a boat out of and sail away from civilization and debt.Maybe I’m always so quiet because I’m holding my tongue, like my mother, and thinking about slashing tires and throwing ceramic dishes at skulls and sinking screwdrivers into flesh, all in the name or petty revenge or an intense burst of anger. Except, come to think of it, my mother doesn’t actually ever hold her tongue, so I suppose I might just be quiet for reasons entirely my own.Maybe I’m just like my mother’s mother, like my mother is so committed to convincing me I am, except fifty years younger; nasally voice, although mine is less whiny and severe; sitting in front of a computer for hours a day, except she uses the computer her husband bought for her to do lazy transcription work so she can have money for cigarettes, the only thing in life her husband won’t buy for her, and I saved up my paychecks in high school to buy my laptop so that I could leave Mudcap High School and graduate early through online classes; we both sleep a lot, and, as my mother said when I was in high school, I “spent a lot of time on my ass” just like Grammy does--although my time in bed was always induced by an inability to find the motivation to get up, and Grammy’s bedridden state came from staying up too late playing online solitaire. Maybe I’m just that girl from Mudcap High School whose hair displayed a new fresh (done at home) short cut and color of the rainbow at the beginning and end of every month whose clothes all came from Salvation Army and whose stomach was always making obnoxious attention-seeking noises in Spanish--wait, you thought all that time that I was a boy? Well, yeah, I guess that’s reasonable. I wore a lot of huge baggy sweaters.Maybe you just know me because you know somebody who knew me. In that case, maybe I only exist in your world and consciousness as the girl who broke Jo-Ellan’s heart, or the girl who tried to look like a boy but then dropped out and grew boobs and is now hot (in the online pictures, at least). Maybe your friend has a friend who knew my twin brother, and so you heard from your friend’s friend who knows my twin brother that my twin brother’s friend saw me on a dating app, and my brother told him, “Don’t worry dude, she doesn’t like dudes. She’s just looking for a sugar daddy.” And so my twin brother, whom we will call “Z”, laughed about it with his friend once the shocking sighting of Z’s twin sister on a dating app had passed, and all was well, but now people know that Z’s twin sister is a sugar baby and not as quiet and sweet as she seems.Maybe you heard about me from Dan or Katherine; maybe you hope to meet me someday, because I sound like a very sweet person and you like the artwork of mine which they showed you. Maybe you heard about me from Tyler, the guy I made sandwiches with when I worked at Subway in high school--in which case you probably believe him when he says that I did drugs in the back room of the restaurant. Maybe you don’t even know my name--maybe you know me because you’ve seen the art I post online. Maybe you feel very connected to me, and feel pleased to see me when you see that I’ve posted a picture of a sketchbook page I’ve completed. Maybe You don’t know my name at all, but the way I layer paint and colored pencils and vary the thickness of my lineart is enough. Maybe the portraits and paintings I share are enough for you to care about me.Maybe you’re one of Sage’s friends. Maybe you hung out with us the October night when it was warm and I was seventeen and he was eighteen and he put acid under my tongue with his goofy smile and then left my house because he was high and felt like God and my bathroom-sized bedroom was like a birdcage for him at that moment in time. Maybe you were there when he skateboarded from my house to Sebastian’s with more acid and weed in his backpack and the intention to share. Maybe you’re one of the three other guys who were at Sebastian’s house, already under the magical intoxication of Sage’s acid when he called a cab to pick me up from my house and bring me there to drink canned beer and smoke mediocre blunts until the sun came up and I noticed how swollen my lips felt, because acid always makes my lips feel all swollen and purple. So maybe you know me as Sage’s girlfriend who he didn’t call his girlfriend until I finally dumped him months later and he begged for me to stay and apologized for never giving me attention or being a good boyfriend. And that was the first time he had called himself my boyfriend.I don’t want to think about nights like those anymore. The boy I’m dating now regards LSD with as much hissing ostracism as if it were all cocaine sold from the alley behind a gas station dumpster. Just thinking about that night makes me feel high, though--my anemia leads me to shiver even in sixty-degree weather, which Midwesterners consider quite warm, but I didn’t mind the wind blowing through my maroon flannel and thin anemic skin that night. As I sat on the cold chipped concrete steps in front of my house waiting for the cab Sage had called for me, the cold was refreshing and good-hearted instead of a brittle cruel punishment from Mother Nature. I didn’t feel insecure about my dingy old black high top Converse; my high-waisted jeans and black T-shirt didn’t make me feel like I looked like a twelve-year-old boy; and the dead-ends in my chin-length purple hair were not worth my concern. The sky all up above and around me and the globe, hugging the horizon of the sleepy little dangerous city, cradling the most dangerous place in all of Indiana in its arm like a tired baby, was stark black, and I could basically smell it; it was a nice undiluted solid black, and there was no pollution hiding the stars. The stars had had a grand day, and were ready to make sure that I was going to have a grand night.The neighbors on all sides of our house were drug dealers, and those were just the neighbors we actually talked to and knew anything about. The National Guard Armory to the right of my mother’s house, right across the narrow one-way street, was comical considering the neighborhood it was in. But none of that mattered; for once I didn’t hate it all. The sky was a rich fragrant black, thick enough to choke you if it had such bad intentions; but its intention were only good. The black was the many yards of high-quality fabric of a fine lady’s skirt flowing endlessly down from a well-tailored strapless bodice with a lovely fit and comely sweetheart neckline. The stars were bright and small enough to be all the jewels and shiny beads which her personal tailor had surely spent weeks or months or even a lifetime hand stitching onto the top layer of her many layers of skirts.It was such a good night to wait outside for a cab.I will never have nights like that again; life is constantly changing. I can try to recreate that, but I will never get it right. Recreating such good things is a privilege entirely out of my pale mortal hands.Maybe you know me as the girl who drew really nice insects at Emmons Elementary when we were nine years old who has since moved to and from at least three public schools in the next city over, and then left public schools entirely right smack in the middle of junior year. Maybe that’s how you know me.You could know me as Andy. If you still know me as Andy, you probably either haven’t spoken to me since sophomore or freshman year, or you knew me in eighth grade when “Andy” was still a thing, and calling me by my real name now just wouldn’t feel right after all that time. I told people to stop calling me Andy junior year, and people obeyed--well, really I just stopped talking to anybody, so nobody called me anything. But the man I am dating now called me my real name yesterday, and it just sounded strange. He never knew me when I was Andy, and Andy only lasted a few years, and I don’t introduce myself as Andy anymore. I don’t care to be called Andy anymore. Yet it feels so strange, hearing somebody casually call me by my real name. Not knowing that I ever had another name. I don’t think I’ve really spoken to people since high school, so that was one of the first times I’ve heard somebody say it. My mother doesn’t even use my name--she’s never really called me my name, or anything nice.I’m rambling. My name just sounds weird. I don’t like it when boys say it passionately.There are so many people that I may be--I can’t even begin to guess which one you may know me as. Even if I were to know exactly what experiences we’ve had together or who told you about me, maybe you don’t even see me as what we’ve done together or what you’ve heard--maybe your own personal thoughts and emotions warped what you know about me. Maybe for the better, probably for the worse. Maybe jealousy came into play somewhere along the road, and no matter what good things you’ve heard, you refuse to accept that somebody who dated somebody who you wanted to date can be genuinely kind and good. Maybe you don’t even remember anymore why you don’t like me. You just don’t.Maybe you’ve loved me since freshman year, before you even knew my name, before you cut your hair short and before I grew mine out, so no bad things you hear about me sound right or can scathe your love. Maybe you don’t want to know me. Maybe you wish you did. Maybe you’re thinking about checking the back cover of this book and scavaging the pages of tiny nonsense text that comes before the first chapter and prologue just so that you can find some email or way to contact me because you think I sound interesting.However you see me now, though, that will change. The way I see myself changes at least three times per hour.
gummygunk
kianamaiart
origamiaround
romaincrisis
andulkaphoto
