I Am Made Up Of Everyone I’ve Ever Known
When you pick up bits of everyone else, who are you really?
In the summers between my years at University, I worked in a warehouse. This was pre-Amazon-hell-warehouse days and honestly, it was a decent place to work. The work was basic, I either walked the long, dark, concrete aisles picking shoes and golf wear, or I stood in the same spot for eight hours a day sticking tags onto sports clothes. When I was tasked with the latter, I spent a summer alongside a wonderful Polish woman and we got to know each other pretty well. She was almost fluent in English, and thank God because I don’t know a single word of Polish. That summer, I helped her brush up on her grammar and she taught me the names of different fruits in Polish, all while we attached stickers and tags to items of clothing.
We liked a lot of the same books, and I had to read The Picture of Dorian Gray for my English course, so one day we were talking about Oscar Wilde.
“He was a gay wasn’t he?”
I’d recently come out to her so I had no doubt that was meant in a ‘He was one of you, right?’ kind of way. While I confirmed that, yes he was gay, I then explained why the ‘a’ in front of the word made it unintentionally offensive. And then I laughed so hard I almost fell down.
