Life Changer

It is on the first day of the year, every year, that my job comes into effect. For the rest of the year, I prepare. I am like that painter that spends days looking at her subject without touching a brush and then, when she is finally ready, finishes her painting with a few, rapid, master strokes.

A person comes to me, they want to change their lives completely, and I do just that. On the first day of the new year they are someone different. My job is done, I disappear. Almost no one has regretted it and asked me to go back to their previous life. There is no going back, they can only change again. But the majority are happy: your life must be really terrible if you decide to be someone else, it’s not something you want to go back to. Not everyone can start from scratch, especially when they feel old. So here I come, and I change everything. This is how I make a living.

This 40-year-old man once, had a wife and a 15-year-old daughter. He felt like they didn’t love him. Once a week he would get home after a 10-hour shift and would hand each of them a red rose. His daughter would not even acknowledge the gesture. The morning after he’d find both roses in the bin, but he kept at it, because he didn’t know how else to show his love. His wife left him out of the house once after his usual 10-hour shift, because their daughter’s boyfriend was in her room and his daughter didn’t feel comfortable having her dad around.  So I changed his life, no more wife nor daughter. If they mostly ignored him he might as well have disappeared.

I have thought of changing my life a couple of times, but having been behind the theatre of identities for so long I feel like it wouldn’t stick: if I changed once I wouldn’t be able to hold onto an identity for long, I’dneed to tried many, feel all of them, even though that is not possible. So I stick to who I am, a Life Changer, and this is one of my cases.

Old names don’t matter, so I can tell you his name was Richard, because now he carries a different name. Richard had a nice girlfriend. She was from an Eastern country, beautiful girl, really. She was ten years younger than Richard. They had a strange relationship. They met at work, he was her boss. He got her promoted. They got together and they split up plenty of times. Richard always made a point to tell me that she got her promotion during one of their break-ups. He admitted he wasn’t too much in the relationship until they split up. It was a serious decision on his part because he felt the relationship wasn’t working and had no future. She wanted a child, because she had to, because she had a condition that forced her to have a child young or never again. He didn’t feel like he was too much into her for a child, he didn’t feel like he was ready or he felt like he was being forced into having a child even though she had never asked him. On the contrary, he felt that the fact she had never asked him meant he had already disappointed her. They didn’t see each other for a month. It was then that he realised he was in love with her. But she had gone back with her old boyfriend, the one she had spent years with. She wasn’t in love, she did it out of habit, she did it not to be alone, they didn’t even see each other, or so she said. Richard fought to her have back for months. They saw each other, they had sex, but she never stayed over, never spent more than a few hours with him. She said she loved him but she never spent time with him. He reached the point he didn’t care she had a boyfriend, but he missed the intimacy of sleeping together with this woman, the way she always pushed him to the edge of the bed while asleep. He missed it so much that he came to me.

I am not an investigator, so it is not part of my job to find out if she was sleeping or not with her boyfriend, and Richard never asked me to. And it is also not part of my job to judge whether a story of unrequited love is reason enough to change one’s life. Identities can be changed more easily than people think. I am not talking about the technical and legal details: that’s my job and I get paid for it. Along with making people disappear. No, what I am referring to is our individual capacity to be someone one day and someone different the following day. Identity may as well be ownership, but this simply means we can sell one identity and buy another one. So last year Richard stopped being Richard. I don’t know whether he is still in love.

This new year, I changed the identity of a woman. Katya was her name, the one she lost. She was an Eastern girl, a beautiful girl, really. She had fallen in love with her boss about a year before when he had helped her coming out of an abusive, long relationship of 10 years. They were together, her and her boss, on and off, for some time. He had come out of a bad relationship, or so he said. For this reason, he did not want anything serious, wanted the both of them to be open and meet other partners. He said he never did meet anyone but her in the end, but she didn’t know whether that was true or not. I never checked, she never asked. He spent most of his time working, and had less and less time for her. It was so bad that Katya decided to stop seeing him, as she felt a nuisance. She felt grateful for the little time he gave her and she realised this was not fair on herself. Katya went on holiday with a group of friends. One of them was her ex. They got back together, she didn’t even know why. It happened probably out of habit. And then he came back, the one that was her boss. He came back saying she was in love with her, that the silence and the distance had made him realise how stupid he had been. He was ready to move with her, give her a child, do no matter what. The following months he behaved as the person she wished he had always been, but she had an agreement with her ex (he was helping her getting money, in not entirely legal ways, but it had nothing to do with me), so she didn’t know how to break out of the situation. She loved him, but she didn’t know how to leave her boyfriend. And then one day Richard, her boss, disappeared. She came to me because she had reached the point where she even doubted he ever existed. Her boyfriend wanted to get married in a few months. So she decided to disappear herself, because that was easier.

Of course, I could have created a new identity for her somewhere close to where his new identity was. I could have played Cupid or Fate and let them meet again. But that would have meant I had failed at my job. My job is to change people’s lives, find them a new name, a new place, a new job. Most of the time, they want a new life because they want to erase failed relationships. Often it is not their lives they wanted to change, but the people around them, they people who are supposed to love them. No one would change their lives if they felt loved and cared for. Their relationship hadn’’t worked: this is why they came to me, both of them. They had been failed and they had failed at love. Would their new identities change who they were, would their new lives rekindle their relationship? Why would it? That would be pure conjecture. It was never their lives the problem, but the way they had lived them. If the man that had been Richard and the woman that had been Katya met again they would rekindle their failures. I give them new opportunities, because life has plenty of them. Leave everything in my hands.