Final Impressions: Personal purgatory[3]
A continuation from what I’m now collecting as an archive of overthinking and my brain never willing itself to be bored. The og post here.
I’ve always struggled with perception; it’s something that irks me because it’s technically within our control. You can talk your way into being whoever is most likable to anyone you talk to at the price of actually being a person (time, energy, and true connection, yk). It’s a skill I’m glad to have but I only got it cause I was so relentlessly insecure (avg teenage girl experience) and in gaining some self awareness (and getting over myself) I realized how impractical it was to try so hard. All of this to say, ik the value of a first impression and the everyday limbo I felt walking the fine line, you like me, you like me not, you love me, you think I’m odd, you trust me, I’m already caught. So what better personal purgatory than a reality check from God himself (or herself, u do u, diva) of knowing exactly what everyone’s final thought of me was.
We don’t stop existing until the last time someone thinks about us, so in this personal purgatory I’d see it, the single final thought of everyone who knew me, when they stopped thinking about me. Where they were, what reminded them of me, and just the depth of it. For some I’m sure I was sweet but forgettable, for others I’m probably bitter and long lasting and I exist in the minds of versions of them I never got to see in life. In more humbling scenarios people who haunt me will have their last thought of me soon after we stop talking and it’ll be frivolous and nothing. Maybe I’m someone’s final thought, like deathbed seeing the light. For friends who go before me maybe it’s the reminder we have plans and those who pass after me it’s a memory they cherish when I’m not there. I’d get to see them in chronological order and by the end perhaps I’d see my children and grandkids and what I was like in their minds. There would be interruptions from the people I loved with the occasional person I met and the tiny sparks of memory would surprise me. A purgatory that reminded me that I don’t matter and do all at the same time.
I started playing around with this idea when I was stopped at the train station from some guy I had a class with, at that point a full four years prior and he had known my face and name enough to ask to split an uber back to campus. Purgatory would be that swell of emotional last thoughts mixed with the more commonly mundane ones; I wasn’t severely important to him but he had not even registered for me. Perception isn’t something we get to choose, not with so many contributing factors, and neither is how long people remember us. I think the point of purgatory is reflection, maybe from God but maybe just from ourselves. I’m bad with names and faces but I now know we had a contemporary issues class together, he had been visiting his girlfriend a state over, and he was effectively practical in a way I wasn’t. The end of purgatory would probably be having the dust settle, all final impressions counted, and existence being put to rest.
P.S.
-a fun life is weird moment is that I had switched into the train guys class but was traveling with a friend of the class I switched out of. The pic I took on the train, pretend it’s grainy for the aesthetic and not cause I never wipe my phone camera. And songs r linked to when I thought about them and quotes r why.
-“You're just thinkin' it's a small thing that happened The world ended when it happened to me”
-“I know that time is elastic And I know when I go All my particles disband and disperse And I'll be back in the pulse”
