The Many Lives I've Lived

I was seven when a boy tugged on my hair in defiance of my playful teasing. He was a year older, with a boyish look I liked, and we were backstage of our culminating show at summer theatre camp. A girl, Kim, had the misfortune of being present at the scene of the crime, and she looked at him with appeasement.

“Karl, you don’t do that to girls!” she said. Karl just stared at her and walked begrudgingly away.

I never saw Kim again after that. But as a buzzing 8-year-old girl, she knew much more than Karl.

Sitting at a bustling market in the city of London, I found myself with a plate of sushi in front of me. Now, London was not my idea. My best friend, Jackie, moved there a couple of years ago for school, and I had missed her dearly. I missed her enough to overcome my anxiety around airplanes, which had formed from watching the National Geographic Channel's Air Crash Investigation series.

Wide-eyed with sleep deprivation, I was now 6000 miles away from home, with crowds of tourists and locals surrounding my small plate of sushi.

Anxiety was the culmination of my not-so-brief stint with depression. Now that I didn’t want to die anymore, I felt the extreme opposite. I live my life too carefully, overcome with the fear of danger on every dimly lit sidewalk and closed street.

Fortunately for me, London had the tenacity of being widely exuberant, beautiful in its own animated spirit. I walked alone, knowing that the city was within me — or more so that I was within the city. However, as beautiful as it was, I felt alien in its foreign streets. I was not used to the crowds, and I was already eager for Jackie to finish work and meet for drinks.

Jackie was a constant in the many lives I’ve lived. She’d seen me with eye bags as dark as rotten mangoes, hair shriveled like uncut bushes, and the time when I met someone who made Karl seem like a ping pong ball.

That felt like forever ago.

I could barely recognize the girl who spent her 20th birthday renting the entire bar with fifty of her so-called friends, nor the girl who wore a blonde wig just to see if she could commit to bleaching it. She did indeed do it, but maybe to spite her friends who told her she looked like a hoe.

But she wasn’t the words that were thrown at her. She was just a girl, unknowing of the world and its casualties.

“Hey!”

Jackie appeared like an incoming night train going home.

She’d asked me if I had ever been to a pub. I have never seen a glass of Guinness in my life, so naturally, we walked the cobbled streets of London in search of the very sacred pub.

Inside, there were heaps of people. People laughing, like they were having the best chat of their lives. I admired them deeply; however, I was in grave denial of that emotion. I bought two beers, one lighter and the other a glass of Guinness. I figured I wanted to thank Jackie for the trip, or rather, for being a constant.

“Cheers!”

We both clinked our glasses together. And I noticed we both declined to tap our drinks at the table and drink from them, like what we used to do back in university. A lifetime ago.

After finishing our drinks midway, she asked me, “Do you look back at it with some fondness, at least?”

I take a minute to pause. Unsure if it’s from an incoming mild case of forgetfulness, or if the many events of my life all just seem to haze and become one unified idea. Or maybe summarizing was just not at the table for me, because I’ve been multiple people each half a decade. I never thought about the answer until now.

“Yes,” I said. I don’t hold back the smile I’m giving her, because it is genuine.

She smiled back. “I’m glad.” And that was that.

I crack back with an inside joke from our elementary school days. And we laugh like our ribs didn’t exist. Tears quietly falling from my eyes, and I wasn’t afraid anymore about what people thought, because they were laughing around us too.

As we exited the pub, we walked gracefully as if we were angels on soft clouds. We passed by tables of people eating, meeting, laughing, talking, just living. And I knew I was at the right place, and at the luckiest time, with people like Jackie who create pockets of loving homes around my heart.

That’s something they can never take away.