journal entry on dignity

If you took everything about you—your favorite color, your weird eating quirks, your favorite date, the movies that make you cry, the songs you fell in love to, your feelings toward yourself—if you took everything about you and added it up, how much of you is out there in the world?

“The coffee this morning is perfect.” I also don’t drink coffee so I don’t know what I’m talking about. “A spider scared the crap out of me this morning but I killed it.” Its stick legs twitched a bit right after it died, and I cried. “Mom, I think I found the one.” I don’t think she found her one.

There are infinitely many beautiful ways to live. The stories we tell are such small fractals of a bigger, larger, capital-letter I. So mysterious and vague: I am, I want, I love… I is who we are, who we think we are, who we tell ourselves who we think we are. And it's so strange to know that every I is referred to by someone else as a you—also one syllable, but more opaque and nondescript.

I’ve been thinking about the distance between I and you when they refer to the same subject. Is that percentage overlap what poets refer to as vulnerability, as, connection, as love? Our lives interweave with one another, forming tapestries created through, “I've never told you before.” Smelted experience through unrequited companionship tells those closest to us how their percentages are only ever always increasing.

 

0%-0.001%: I thought there was a fly on the floor. It was a raisin.

20%-24%: Look at this painting I painted of us.

40-50%: Do you feel about me how I feel about you?

69%: You looked at my internet browsing history!

70%-85%: I do.

 

Maybe that’s it. Maybe it stays at 85% for the closest person we will ever know. These numbers are arbitrary, of course. Maybe I want to stay at 50.1%, so that I can always know more about myself than the rest of the world combined.

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