I contain multitudes

I am a mosaic of people I have known

A friend of mine recently told me that she likes to live a life of many people. I nodded when she said it and then wrote it down in my notes app. The note reads: Write a substack about living a life of many people, the external version of I contain multitudes.”

She also asked me if I had any old friends, any people who I still keep in touch with from the different schools I went to. Obviously Ruby and I are still going strong but I don’t really check-in with people as much as I should.

Ruby was my roommate at boarding school in Vermont. I have written about her at length, on here, for photography projects, and for class assignments. I say that I think she knows me the best, simply because she is the person who has held on to me the longest. Three years is not that long, but it is the longest I have known someone. She has seen me be straight, and then bi, and then lesbian. Ruby and I were looking at old photos of us recently. We noticed how much our faces had changed. The wardrobe we once shared has shifted into something more colorful, more grown-up. Ruby brings a certain sense of play into my life. She laughs at the jokes I make and attempts to be friends with anyone I love. For this I love her.

When I think about the multitudes of people in my life I lament that I can’t make time for all of them every day. When I live with someone it’s easy to sink into a friendship that is solely based on the fact that we occupy the same space. While this kind of relationship is special and important to me, I am realizing that it is not the only way that someone can be special to me.

I have three newish friends, Juliette, Kate, and Ellie. I don’t live with them, so I don’t see them every day. Juliette still makes an effort to text and ask how I am doing, and when they see me they give me a hug and we catch up, even if I declined their invite to hang out the previous day. This surprised me at first, the idea that I could be friends with someone, that they could care about me, and me them, without talking to them every single day. The sheer comfort that this gives me is relaxing. I do not feel as though I am chasing them down to make sure they remember me, I know that they do.

Juliette is dark-haired and intense. She opens herself to you the minute that you meet her. Watching her converse with a stranger is like watching her pour water onto a silty stone until it’s clean, revealing the color underneath the dirt. The stranger does not know that Juliette is looking for a laugh, a story, a connection, they simply allow their dirt to be washed away by her words. Soon they are sharing anecdotes from their childhood and laughing. Juliette seems pleased with herself.

Kate is quiet. Her hair is short and you might perceive her as short as well, but she is 5’5’, just average. She texted me at the beginning of our friendship and asked if I wanted to smoke a joint. Knowing I needed a connection, I agreed and slipped on my shoes to walk three flights down to her apartment. When I got there it was just her alone. I was surprised (and flattered) that she had felt comfortable enough around me to ask me to come hang out with her alone. We smoked her weed and talked. “I really need to consume some media right now,” she said to me. I agreed. We scrolled through what my mother calls America’s favorite television show, the Netflix homepage. We watched a reality TV show from the 2016 MTV era, Are You The One? 18 bisexuals in a house together, trying to pair into their “perfect match”. Usually, I have to be incredibly comfortable to nonverbally watch television high with someone. This is the nice thing about Kate, she never thinks something is strange or off. She can sit in silence with someone without searching for more.

Ellie is a warm presence. She has short hair dyed cherry cola red. She is the perfect person to sit on the porch with and chat. My toes are cold, and my fingers that hold the joint are almost frozen but I don’t mind. When I am having a hard time I come to her apartment and tell her all my drama. She nods in the right places and comments when appropriate, “That is so funny” “That’s insane, just insane.” I appreciate this. “I know right!” I feel validated, and not as crazy. I listen to her stories and laugh. She wants to write for SNL. She reads me the plays she is writing sometimes. She goes into her actor mode and goes all out for me. When she finishes she giggles like what she wrote isn’t that good. I always disagree. She has a lot to say, smart things that she thinks, and when she does say them I am always entranced by the inner workings of her brain.

In my life of many people are my roommates, Katie, Nora, and Lola. I have also written at length about them.

Lola is my ex. We had a strained relationship at the beginning of the year and a stint of not talking. Recently we have been going on errands together. We listen to a lot of the same music. “I had forgotten how good your music taste is” I told her last week as we drove back from Trader Joe’s. We have finally reached the point where we can talk about the girls we are seeing without feeling like we are treading on dangerous hurtful territory. She tells me it’s nice to see me. I tell her likewise. We don’t hang out often, but I enjoy having her in my life.

I wrote about Nora a lot, I made a puppet of Nora. We cried when we thought we weren’t going to be roommates. Now we are roommates, but I don’t think that either of us sleeps in our room that often. I was hit recently with the realization that Nora and I have grown apart. Though this shift is developmentally appropriate, it made me melancholy. It means that I have changed, and she has changed, and the dust has settled and we are not in the same place I thought we would be. I can still feel us when we laugh together, or share glances and pass notes in class.

The other day Nora was wrapping her birthday present to Katie. "I forgot to get a birthday present for Katie,” I said out loud. “Well, why would you?” Nora snorted, wrapping red gingham ribbon around the brown paper package. She’s right, I thought. It was an I-mean-I-was-going-to-say-no-but-why-are-you-saying-no kind of situation. I made Katie a collage that night. It read, “Katie is twen-tea” in cut-out magazine letters. She thanked me.

I met someone new just two months ago. She and I would exchange glances in our blues ensemble, the two of us laughing at things that might’ve been bits just between us, or maybe it was just laughing because we enjoy seeing each other smile. When we hung out just the two of us she had this intense cool girl vibe. As we have started to see each other every day we learn things about each other. I told her I love to make jokes about demonias and veneers. She gasped. “I love to make jokes about demonias and veneers at least once a day”. “How do you feel about mayonnaise?” I asked her as we sat across from each other in a diner in Harlem. “Hate it.” I smiled. I told her that my parents like to say that they bonded over their hatred of mayonnaise and love of books the first night they met. She tells me that that seems like a little much. I laugh, this is one of the jokes that we share. When at first she did not seem real to me, just someone who I made up in my head, she now holds her own solid personhood in my life. I have started to notice her phrases and her mannerisms and they have slipped into my speech patterns, unnoticed by me. She, refreshingly, does not know anyone I know and I do not know anyone she knows. As we continue to spend time together, however, it becomes more real, the place I hold in her life and the place she holds in mine. She told me that she likes Ruby. I tell her that is important to me. As time goes on I get to see her interact with the multitudes of people in her life, and I see the multitudes inside of her. I am delighted to see a new side of her every time it comes out. I was delighted when I realized that we have started to act like ourselves around each other, I realized that she acted differently around me than an acquaintance. I was elated to realize that she once acted like I was an acquaintance, and now I am more.

Every November I start to get this urge to call people who used to be in my life, who I haven’t talked to in 5 years. Last year I wrote about the melancholy feeling that November gives me. It marks the beginning of the end of the year when the sun disappears behind a blanket of gray and we will not see her again until April. It is somewhat comforting to me, this feeling of reminiscence. This November, in thinking about my life of many people, I am thinking about the people who I am no longer in contact with, but who still live inside me.

Bella was my best friend in 8th, 9th, and 10th grade. We were attached at the hip. We could do anything together and be having fun. She and I would bike and get coffee together. I would go to the Starbucks and she would go to the Einsteins Bagels next door. I would order two venti vanilla iced lattes with almond milk and she would order an everything bagel with cream cheese and a poppy seed bagel with butter. Then we would eat on the grassy hill outside of my mother’s office building. She taught me the way that she liked to put her straw in the coffee; bang it on the table until the paper rolls down almost halfway, then grab the straw with only two fingers exactly where you think the lid will swallow the straw, and then put the straw in the cup without touching the end that goes in the coffee or the end that goes in your mouth. Now it is second nature to me to open the straw like that. Bella lives on inside of me in other ways. She and I aren’t in contact anymore, but sometimes she likes my social media posts, and it’s comforting to know that she still thinks I’m funny. I still think she is funny, and I still check up on her. We grew up and grew apart, as is developmentally appropriate for 16-year-olds.

My ex-boyfriend, Charlie used to put spaces between the punctuation mark and the word at the end of his text: are you coming ? I still do this, though we have not talked in over a year.

Ruby has this certain way of saying “amazing” that slipped into my vocabulary three years ago without me even noticing.

My best friend from middle school, Amanda, taught me that if you are vegetarian then you can get a Cheesy Gordita Crunch from Taco Bell with beans instead of beef. I have never ordered anything else.

These habits that I steal from people in my life let me carry them with me. Therefore, who am I but an amalgamation of all the people I have ever loved and who have loved me? If they had not perceived me the way that they did, I am sure that I would not perceive myself as who I am right now.

Sometimes I have thought that containing such multitudes of people is my greatest downfall, my biggest red flag. It could send the message that I am flaky, that I don’t stick around, or, god forbid, that people get bored of me after a year or two. I have that fear all the time. The upside is that these people have all brought out different parts of me, and have added parts of me that I love. I act differently with different people, and they act differently with me than they do with others. This is not putting on a mask or pretending, it is simply adjusting to my surroundings.

I like to say that I contain multitudes, both sardonically and honestly, because I do. This life of many people tethers me to the ground, I cannot feel lonely.