Objects in mirror may be further back in time than they appear

When I was thirteen years old, I bought a typewriter. I thought, at the time, that even though computers existed (they actually were the object I had used to buy the typewriter), that since the historical authors I admired wrote on typewriters, writing on a typewriter would make me more like them. 

I would return home from school every day, no matter how long my day had been, if I had stayed late for play rehearsal during my short stint as a theater kid or gotten off the bus with the rest of the afternoon free, and I would type up a poem on that typewriter. I bought cartridges for the write-out tape at Staples. I absolutely was not the authors I had imagined myself to be, but I was a writer. I wrote poems about the theater rehearsal that day, or the girls I admired, or how I felt.

I no longer live in the room that I had typed those poems on, and the typewriter has exchanged custody on eBay to some stranger, but the poems are in my lap as I type this on my computer. The ink, the typewriter font, the meaning of the typewriter, the idea behind it, that girl who wanted to be a writer? All those objects, the paper that had been typed, the words, that teenage angst, it's in a folder beside me as I type this story about characters and change.

The girls I had written about in those poems are no longer girls. I'm no longer a girl either, or perceived as one. Ten years have passed since those days I typed away on printer paper, leaving typos in my poems because I wanted to conserve the eraser tape, the clacking of keys far louder than the sounds emitted by the object I am currently using to type this. But those poems, they are objects, a stack of papers in a file. 

My poems were about the dead weight on my chest, about saying "I'm strangely intimidated by you" to a girl who was kind because kindness was so absent from my ordinary life that it scared me, and it hurts to read them a decade out because the emotions behind them are still true. I'm still an outsider, still able to "go anywhere and be uncomfortable" even though I'm significantly happier at age twenty three than I was at age thirteen. I don't think it would be possible to maintain the misery that fueled those poems long-term - that might have been why I stopped writing them. 

When I was that age, I had a TracFone - a type of flip phone my health insurance gave out to autistic children in case they ran off. It wasn't until I graduated high school that my parents let me get a smartphone, which I think was probably smart of them. I spend so much time on my smartphone, although that's partially because I have nothing to do. Ages six through eighteen were spent in public schools, required to pay attention and interact with people. Now, interaction is a choice, one that often requires the intervention of a phone to make occur. Although that's not why I spend my time on my phone, not always. I also try to make money using it. 

That first smart phone has been discarded, but the second one is now only a physical object taking up space on my desk. It stopped working, so I have a new phone that works, but discarding electronics is difficult so I just haven't. I just leave it on the desk above the files of my thirteen-year-old-self's angst, face down so it doesn't tempt me to try pushing the button that would mislead me into believing it could work. That phone had a Canadian cell number, so my friends from university would be in the contacts. I theoretically could contact them now, through the internet everything is possible, but what would I say? How would I reconnect? We would be in different places, both physically and metaphorically. 

Metaphorically, I'm nowhere, not heading towards any destination I can see. The objects I use most are always the same: that current Samsung smartphone, my wallet with my bank cards, library cards and miscellaneous cards I rarely use, my hearing aid which is bright so I don't lose it. Another object I value that contains my writing, handwritten, a thousand page journal I bought off Amazon after graduating high school, has continued to collect my thoughts since leaving university. My main problem with writing in it consistently is that I lose my writing utensils, something that didn't happen nearly as often when I was in school.

I bet, if I compared the contents, similar themes would emerge between the early teenage poems and the post-adult-teenage-and-early-twenties journal entries. I am the same person, after all - still autistic and therefore confused and frustrated by social stuff, still transgender although significantly happier in my body, still someone who scribbles out messed up words rather than thinking ahead to avoid messing them up in the first place. 

Meaning is made by someone who uses something, an object, and I’m using an iPad right now to type this after having started writing this story on my laptop. The iPad had a purpose when I first bought it, my senior year of high school - I was going to use it to photograph my artwork for my applications to art schools. Now the iPad is what I use to read books, write stories, contact the outside world on rainy days like today…

At university I would use FaceTime to trick my lizard into thinking I was home again. Now, actually being home, no trickery with objects are necessary. I’d screenshot those images of Whoopie (my leopard gecko) running towards Mom’s phone - they truly are precious. Of course, the lizard is more precious, but this iPad kept me connect to him when I was four hours away. That gave the object meaning, more than it has now, anyway.