Reposted from my livejournal blog. Wrote this July 2004.
Don’t you ever wish you could start over with people? Make them forget everything they’ve ever known about you, make them forget every single moment you’ve ever shared with them? You remove all their pre-conceived notions about who you are, and simply become – a stranger. A tabula rasa. A blank slate. You could go up to them and introduce yourself – Hi! I’m Helene, and you are? – and their minds wouldn’t be filled with their memories of you, because they have no memories of you. You are simply how you present yourself to be. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
They wouldn’t remember you as the little girl who always sulked and cried because her older sisters always went on trips while she was left home with her brothers. They have no memory of you accidentally breaking your cousin’s toy, making her cry and making her older sister hate you. They don’t recall you as that small girl with the small eyes with the oversized glasses taking up half of her face all throughout grade school.
You never burst out crying in the mall because you felt so lonely. Never went down on your knees and kissed your friend’s feet to make her forgive you even though you hadn’t done anything you needed her forgiveness for. You never had your head always stuck on a book because it helped you escape the feeling of being out of place in this world.
You never did these things, because no one remembers them. You have no past in these people’s eyes.
The only time you start to exist for them is the moment you choose to meet them.
Oh, to be a stranger! Haven’t you ever felt that it’s easier to talk to people you’ve met for the first time than people you’ve known all your life? You don’t have to worry that all their memories of you are flashing in their minds. You are nothing to them. You are free from all their expectations.
So to be nothing to people is to be free… and yet, is it really? How can you be free when all that you are, all the things you’ve ever experienced, are all locked inside you – only you – and you have no one to share them with?
Isn’t it more freeing to let it all out? Even if you know that every time you tell someone a little bit more about yourself, you’re probably scaring that person off – maybe you’re even trying to scare that person off, exposing more and more of yourself, trying to see how much that person can take – even if you know that person is liable to run away, because the more you reveal, the needier you become, until you can’t stop revealing, exposing, baring yourself… wanting, needing that person to accept it all… to tell you that no matter what you reveal, no matter how needy you become, no matter how much easier it would be for that person to simply turn tail and run, to forget about you… he can’t, he won’t, he doesn’t want to. Because he accepts and understands you. Perhaps he even realizes he needs you as much.
Isn’t it ironic that it’s only freeing once someone takes it all in, accepts and understands?
In the end, we simply want someone to tell us that we’re okay – that we can be loved as us – we don’t have to start over and give that person a blank slate to fill. He wouldn’t run away from us, grimy surface and all. He would share our lifetime of memories. He would add to it.