Choose Your Character

September is right around the corner. It’s a new, fresh, start. For you and for me. We’re in different places now, you’re in Berlin, I’m in London. Who will you be, when I see you again?

Four years are long, the distance even longer. But I know that what we thought to be intangible, will no longer be there. It’s a fact of life. What did you say again? Something along the lines of “you’ve only known me today, and I rebuild myself every day”? I get it now, only after the greenery sunk into the ground. There’s always a question we ask ourselves inadvertently, “who will I be today?”. And we switch masks as quickly as the lights flicker on campus. Will I be cool girl Jess? Or tomboy Sacha? There’s never one I can choose, to be sure. Just as opinions sway, so does my mindset, my words and my actions. We change, we select the traits we want to keep, cast others away, and reconstruct the figure of who we want to be. Is there anything better than our personal versatility?

We’re in different universities, different buildings, catching glances from different people. Who will you be, when I see you again?

I’ve been good, mean, bad, terrible. But nobody knows that here. Because in a new place like this, I’m shrouded in more anonymity than anytime else in my life. How would you see me, if I pretend that I’ve never eaten peaches before? What if I told you I’ve never been in love before? You’d probably despise me, now that my false expressions seem to be a validation to you. Just as I loved you then, you would loathe me now. And once I invent a new identity for myself, there will be no traces of you left in me. How would you feel then, when I’m no longer within the reach of your recognition?

I’ve changed faces so often that I’m not even sure who I am anymore. That’s the flaw of this system of trickery. Masks are easy to put on, yet difficult to keep on, without eventual suffocation. These theatrics are as exciting as ephemeral. We can’t expect DiCaprio to be Gatsby every day. Right, this has been a millennial discussion, “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”. We are actors of the theatrical shitshow of decrepit reality, borne into the false graces of expectations. As much as you and I don’t want to acknowledge it, the masks we’ve adorned are but the amalgamation of social cues, the environment and our past. But what happens once the glass becomes too heavy to hold? What happens when the tightrope you’ve walked on snaps into the abyss? What happens when you’re gasping for air underneath that foolish cover you’ve kept on you for a day, a month, and eventually a year?

And thus, we break. The mask cracks from your forehead to your eyes, from nose to lips. It all starts falling apart, faster than the tumbling avalanche. That’s when you know who you are. When the layers of your artificial skin start peeling away. Because that’s when your skeleton shines through underneath the moonlight. Your weary bones finally show themselves to the world in the most catastrophic, unimportant, raw drama. It’s a revelation to the stars, the secret guardians of the night, the real you, without shallow pretence and impure perfection. But even then, you ask yourself, disappointment in your head, “Is this really who I am? Am I not so much more than this broken doll that shatters at the slightest tremor?”

These leaves that we have never seen before, these new buildings, faces and smiles. They’re all so different from what we have known. But when the stars scatter and meet, who will you be?

The streets glow amber, and I understand it now more than ever. You will not be who you were, and I will not be who I was. We’ve adorned our masks for too long, and there’s no going back to who we have been. I know that as much as you do. We’ve picked our favourite character, our adored avatar, to play us like a fiddle. We no longer control who we are, how we act, or what we do. The ideal image of ourselves drives us, more than we pretend to be. Oh, what tragic irony. We’ve constructed ourselves a new figure to control our publicity, but now, the expectations derived from our invention control us. So when we break, are we truly ourselves? From dawn to dusk, our avatar guides us, but from dusk to dawn, do we breathe?

The biggest tragedy lies in our thoughts. We think, we convince ourselves, at least the “we” that we believe we are, of our freedom. And God above us chuckles at our futile unravelling. Because the “we” is no longer us, but the falsehood ingrained. Once we adorn a mask, it sticks to us and never lets go, like a parasite. Wanting to go back to when we decided upon our roles is impossible. And in nostalgia, we envy the past, for we were but still innocent. Certainly, innocent from the future choice we would decide upon, the inevitable time when we adhere to the character we hand-picked. Like a coursing river, there’s not much we can do to halt the flow of time, reverse it, and incite ourselves to stay true. There is no way to return all the way back, to when we have just reached the age of consciousness. Do you still remember who you were at the ripe age of seven?

Where do I even begin to tell you who we were, before the influence of nurture happened upon us? How far do we have to go, to get to the centre of all these various layers? How many times must we shed to get to the heart of it all? I don’t know, thus I’ll delude myself into believing the image I’ve created of myself. And in the way I see myself, will you see the same? And is that part of me you see, who I really am? Am I not a colourful melange of these little parts people see of me? And so, will I be the sum of all these masks adorned?

And in the midst of these paradoxes, these shallow thoughts and innumerable nonsense, I’ll ask you this: who will I be, when you see me again?