“I don’t understand” I whisper to the version of me sitting cross legged on my bed, like my reflection in my mirror.
“Why do you look like me today?”
She gives me a pitying look.
Her cropped honey blonde hair has a tiny braid framing one side of her face, exactly like mine. She is wearing the same black Lord Huron tee I got for my birthday last summer, the same white lace skirt, and the same pink and red Nike Dunks that I just finished putting on minutes ago. I can smell the smoke and berry jam scent of the perfume I just sprayed on my wrist wafting off of her. I nervously pick at the fraying spot on my wine-colored bedspread, scared of what she will say. My phone dings as a text from my friend River comes in. “Where are you, Aurora??” it says. The time on my phone says nine fifteen, making me late to River’s graduation party. As if he could hear my thoughts, my phone dings again. “Your late!” it says.
“When you decided to go to River’s party tonight, something changed. You will never be the same person you are tonight.” The other me says, jerking my attention back to the situation at hand.
“What happens to me?”
“She can’t tell you” the sixteen-year-old version of me says, sitting in my vanity chair and dragging my red lipstick across her lips. I have told her that I hate when she uses my makeup, but she doesn’t care. I don’t understand how someone who isn’t actually real can still use up my entire tube of mascara.
I know she is right though. The other me will not tell me what happens to me. They have never been forthcoming about my future and who I become, they only symbolize who I am not. Any time my life trajectory changes, they appear to me, like ghosts haunting my decisions. Sometimes they have a quick visit, sometimes they stick around. I wonder if this version of me might be one that sticks around.
It has happened to me once before, where I couldn’t accept the loss of the person I wasn’t going to get to be. I had thought it was a mistake when that version of me, late 20’s and wearing an ivory gown made of delicate scraps of silk and lace appeared. She had longer hair than I did, with strands of the honeyed locks twisted into coils and pinned up with gold and pearl hair pins. Her makeup had been soft peaches and browns, with dark brown eyeshadow swiped on like eyeliner highlighting her downturned eyes and making them look even bigger, like a begging puppy. She appeared after my first boyfriend Seth broke up with me. It was December of my Sophomore year of high school, right before Christmas break. Seth told me right after 3rd period, in the courtyard with snowflakes fluttering down around us, that his parents were moving his family to Maryland for his dads work and we should break up. I cried into his chest as he held me for the last time, and it was in that moment that the other me appeared. I remember the half-strangled sob I let out when I first saw her and put together the pieces of the breakup and the wedding dress. Going through my first heartbreak was already devastating but knowing that there was a version of me that was meant to marry him one day, and now would never get to, that made it so much harder. I had lived with the bride version of myself for almost 2 years before she moved on. 2 years of that reminder, day and night, at home and at school. She was even with me on my first post breakup date.
I hear my mom downstairs in the kitchen and it jolts me out of that memory.
“What if I just change my mind and don’t go to the party?” I ask. One of the other version of me scoffs in the background.
“Like that would ever happen” says sixteen-year-old me. She is really starting to get on my last nerve. I know she’s right though. No matter what, I am going to that party. Whenever I decide to do something, I do it. It’s a point of stubborn pride for me. Even if I do change my mind, I don’t think it will make a difference. These alternate versions of myself don’t appear every time I make a decision, it had to be life altering and set in stone.
I get up and walk over to my dresser. It’s covered in books, half-finished knitting projects, and dusty CDs. What I am looking for is half obscured by the mess, a framed photo of me with my mother. It was my 7th birthday, the first time that another version of me appeared. In the photo I am wearing a blue tulle Cinderella dress with those blue plastic dress up heels, and my mom is crouched down next to me, her arm around my shoulders and a big smile on her kind face. I wish I could tell my mom about this, ask her for her advice, but I know that I can’t. I am scared. Scared of being dismissed, scared of disappointing my mother, scared of causing any trouble to my family, who are so happy. What would they do if they knew this had been happening to me? How could I tell them about how crushed I had been that first time when they dismissed my truth as being imagination?
On that birthday I had received a few of the Animal Ark books. I was reading them in my room that night when a 58-year-old woman appeared, with eyes that crinkled at the ends and streaks of white gray in her hair. I thought it was my Mimi at first and didn’t realize otherwise until I noticed the lack of the rose perfume that usually burned my nose with its sickly-sweet musk. The not-my-Mimi told me that she was the Aurora who had become the 60th president of the United States, and that when I was reading those books and decided I wanted to be a veterinarian instead of president, that version of me stopped existing. I screamed and ran to tell my parents, but they couldn’t see anyone there. They were convinced I had an “overactive imagination”, and she was my new imaginary friend, so I never told anyone about this again.
“What if this is a mistake?” I whisper to the picture version of my mom, “What if I lose the person I am meant to be? What if this changes me forever?”
What if I don’t like who I become? is the thought that I can’t bring myself to say, the one that really haunts me every time I have to make a decision.
I close my eyes and focus on the sound of my mother’s bell like voice singing in the kitchen as she cleans. I can’t make out what song she is singing, but the sound of her voice brings me comfort.
My bed creaks behind me as the phantom version of myself untangles her legs and climbs off the bed to come stand next to me. We look in the mirror, two versions of the same girl, side by side, identical. The phantom version of me smiles, and despite all of my insecurities and the questions plaguing me, I can’t help but smile back.
“I can’t say what is going to happen to you or how you are going to change” she starts, “I don’t know if it will be for the better, or for the worse, or if you will just be different. But for everything you lose, you also have so much you can gain. You’re going to change. Everyone changes, and lucky for them they don’t always have to face that reality instantly like you do, but there is nothing you or anyone else can do to stop it. The best you can do is to accept it, to overcome it, and to grow from it.”
I start to open her mouth to reply, but the sixteen-year-old version of me picks up in her place.
“And if you don’t like the person you are becoming, then you become someone new. If you want to be something, then be it. We’re just phantoms, but you are real. It is your life to live. You get to choose.”
I want to laugh at the wise words coming from the bratty sister-like version of me who has been haunting my room for the past year. I smile at the different versions of me standing in front of me. I know in that moment that they are right. They are a part of me, and that means that those thoughts and feelings are inside of me too. They are right, this is my life, and I have the power to become whoever I want to be.
I take a deep breath and reach for the door, before turning back for another look at those other versions of me.
“Are you coming?” I ask, “We have a party to get to.”
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