Moving house means you’re busy.

These few weeks have been just a little bit like hell–it’s in my nature to be lazy and selfish, so I’m getting by, working just enough to make it seem like I’m helping and complaining about the work we’ve had to do.

But, really, I’ve been pulling pieces of myself from the cardboard boxes of my childhood.

It’s surreal. Everytime I look at pictures of myself from–5 years ago, 4 years ago, I no longer recognize the person in it. Sure, that’s Erika. But I refuse to identify as that idiot. Not in a transgender, body dysmorphia type of way, but in a way that I hope means I’ve grown and changed as a person. She’s not me! I’m better!

And maybe time capsules are for legacy.

But in my time capsule, I want to scrub away every bit of my history. I want to wipe my past clean. I want to be a character in a video game that any player can easily insert themselves into, to wear my skin and masquerade as me, the player, a stranger, present with no past. 

That’s impossible, of course. Every part of my past, shameful, happy, traumatic, whatever–it’s all me. I can’t run from it and won’t.

God, I want to.

My room’s a mess, but I tossed all everything deemed integral to my character development in a gift box given to me by friends. It’s all the parts of the past I loved, everything from sticky notes to ripped drawings to selfies to stickers to thank you for coming to my party! notes and diary entries. It doesn’t bulge when I shut the lid, but I want to tie it shut. Just to be sure.

Then I labelled it IMPORTANT, and put it on the top shelf, and forgot about it until this article.

I don’t know how to feel about her anymore.

I can laugh at her. She’s funny, in the way you’d shove someone in a locker and laugh.

…you wouldn’t shove someone in a locker?

I digress. She’s cute, too, in the way all children are, and that’s about where all good points end.

I know it’s unhealthy and probably self-loathing, but I have nothing good to say to myself. I can talk myself up to others. I can say I am a good person. But if I could go back in time, I don’t think I’d want to ever see her. Not a year into the past, not a month, not a day, not an hour. I am not a good person, and I cannot lie to myself.

I refuse to engage in a screaming match with her in this hypothetical, impossible scenario. I will argue and cry and scream and shout and my past will remain stubborn.

I do not want to hurt myself. But I wish she didn’t exist, even though I know she made me.

She’s stuck in the past, permanently, and I will never see her.

That’s for the better.

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I remember being surprised when I went to the mall, one day, and saw kids riding on the crappy little mall rides, the ones that sit a child or two. 

I thought those were made for just me!

I can’t believe people ride these things. I’d never seen a family get their child on it before, but now something I had previously held sacred and mine alone in memory, was–someone else’s.

TIme capsule, time capsule, time capsule…

What really was ever mine?

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What am I trying to say…?

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Fuck.

I’ll come back when I’ve pulled myself together.

Consider this my piece for the time capsule. For me of the future, for the strangers of the internet (or just MONGA enjoyers, I guess).

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I hope I come back better.

By Erika