The In-Between Parts

An indiscreet timeline

I wasn’t the person I was 10 years ago, or 5 years ago, and hell, probably not even 2 years ago. That scared me, the fact that I could look back at a quarter of my lifetime and be severed from it. There were barely any ties left to my childhood, and they weren’t the things I wanted to keep with me: my grandfather being stuck in a nursing home bed, M getting abused, seeing my parents drift apart — the fights, the aggression, the fights. I felt like I wasn’t even present in those moments, like I was just as much a part of them as I am right now looking back at them from another time period.

I was the kid with an unhappy childhood, which paved the smooth road to an unhappy adolescence. I was quiet, cruel, scared, and I thought I was the world. I didn’t like the effect I had on others, which was either minimal or destructive. But then things wouldn’t stop being messed up and people started leaving, headed to jail or the hospitals or heaven, and just like that I was outside looking in again with no idea how I fit into this world.

So I felt ripped away from the life I had as a kid (as if I could even remember it), and now I was old enough to feel ripped away from my adolescence. I guess I’ve always felt ripped in half anyway, but now the halves were broken into halves, and there were all these pieces of me, either swirling around in my head or on their way to the garbage disposal. I didn’t feel whole — I thought that I was supposed to be the whole sum of all of my parts, but I didn’t know where, or what, they even were.

And it always came back to the question of, who am I? Who am I compared to who I was? Who was I anyway? Does it even matter? I used to think people didn’t change, and then I learned that they didn’t change their core, and then I learned that they grew rather than changed. And then I realized: I didn’t know anything about what I thought I knew.

I slowly started to like myself, even though I may not have known who that was at all, but I knew that I tried to help people, and I tried to make them feel appreciated and special and loved- a lot more than I did before. I didn’t think about myself as changing while it was happening. At the time, I thought that I was growing up, and that I’d learned, or realized. But looking back at it all, it’s like parts of myself got completely swapped out, taken out and replaced by the chunkfuls.

Sometimes I’m still sad that I completely lost my childhood with no traces. The thought of being severed from a self that took 16, 17 years to form is off putting. All that time wasted and unknown and forgotten; and I couldn’t stop it: a colander desperately trying to hold in water — but I’m less disturbed by it now, because when I think about it, why would I want to hold onto the bits of me that I hate? The bit of me that was mean to other people; the bit of me that cared so much about looks; the bit of me that manipulated relationships; the bit of me that was desperate to be like everybody else; The halves of halves built up, and they consumed me. The water was dark, and murky, and blurry. Some of that old water is still there, stuck around the edges and lining the walls, but the replacement saved me.

I know now that I’m not any less whole for letting go of a past self, maybe because I’ve finally built myself another one. But at the time, it was the in-between parts that killed me. I think I’m finally on the other side now, but the memories are crystallized of what it felt like to be suspended on the cusp between something I wanted to keep with me and something I needed to move on from — living in the gaps of time with no home to go to, until the night became quiet and still and soft around the edges.