Expectations

I have stepped into the city of my childhood; it isn’t as loud as it used to be. The sun filters through the dust and haze, like a lonely gas station bulb symbolic of a weariness I can’t shake off.

There is no purpose to my visit, none that I know of. We are only passing through, yet, my parents insist on revisiting the past, a past that will never feel as good as it did. My mind has developed a certain revulsion to going back in time, to reexamining memories from outside the aquarium. I am always overcome by this feeling of secondhand embarrassment, which makes me pick out all the things I should have done differently, even if it is just the simple act of drinking a glass of water. I am ashamed that I chose to exist so freely.

Nothing here has changed which makes me furious because this city is still trapped in the past and, by default, so is 13 year old me. The small community center opposite our old house still sells the diarrhea inducing golgappay and chat masala coated fries. Even the seller is the same old-young man, rumored to have four sons in their twenties despite looking not a day over twenty-five. Turns out, he indeed has four offsprings, however only two of them are sons and none of them in their twenties. There is no logic to childhood, and how we let the rumor mill run wild.

As we walk up to the seating area, all the servers recognize us and the catching up begins, “How much you have grown, how young you were, what you are up to now.” Again, my brain has betrayed my body; I have flown out of the aquarium, suspended in the heavy air, observing my life from the outside –inside. It is asking me the stupidest question, but I have managed to convince myself that there is some depth to it, something so inherently profound it demands this out of body experience: I remember this server because he was one of out of the six people I interacted with here on a daily basis, however how does he remember me, when I am just one of the fifty plus people he interacted with on the daily. Does he remember all of them? Is it just me? Am I supposed to feel special? Should I feel special, only to find out later, god knows how, that he indeed remembers all fifty plus of the other people? Why does all of this matter all of a sudden?

There is nothing special about this visit, and my brain needs to stop trying to make it so. My brain is not me; it is a material extension of me. I own it, I keep it, but it exists outside of me. A warning, if you will that disassociation is a two way road. My brain has betrayed my body, and I have betrayed it. What is this disease plaguing me?

A silence is not deafening, a silence cannot be deafening–I detest the inaccuracies propagated in this age of hyperbole. The silence at our table is oppressive, it is suffocating, and it is telling me that since our mouths have ceased to function, my lungs too should comply. Can silence even speak?

I have just noticed that too many of my paragraphs end in question marks, a mark of bad writing, and perhaps a sign of my quest for answers on this mundane visit to a city that once meant something to me. Stop. I am only joking. Even with a gun to my head, I could not bring myself to care about anything enough to go on a quest for answers, especially when I don’t even know the questions. Which is why, perhaps, the question marks are just a sign of my confusion at why my brain, which is not me, is reacting so emotionally on a visit to this stale vista of my childhood.

I am trying to not make this sound like some edgy teen shitposting, however, I cannot help it for I am stuck in a city, which will not forget me, with 13 year old me, and I hate her. My mouth is bitter with all the bile frothing out of it, I don’t just hate her, I resent the fact that she even existed, that she formed a past I now have to revisit in drawing room conversations and in the eyes of my mother as she pulls the rug from under my feet.

I am a cliché.

I rationalize, suspended in the heavy air, watching twenty-one year old me trying to shrink under the watchful gaze of my past, would I feel so inadequate if there was no past to compare to? My past is a painful comparison for my present, an accusation—this is not who you were supposed to be. The revulsion comes from knowing I have fallen way too short of expectations, if somehow I could erase my past from the memory of the world, there would be no expectations. I would not be running back, imagining a return of the carefree confidence of a 13 year old girl dressed in a man’s button down, a knitted powder blue vest and a striped tie.