I Contain Multitudes
Check out unsent messages sent to your name in the Unsent Project here
“01/08/2021: I haven’t seen your face or heard your voice in so long… I miss you every single day.
08/11/2020: I miss looking at the rain and thinking of you, or even just hearing a song that reminded me of you. You used to be my favorite person.
08/06/2020: Some days, I wake up extra early just to make sure you’re still here.
06/05/2020: I thought I knew what love was. You showed me love isn’t painful, it’s easy.
06/09/2020: I never believed that someone would make me feel the way that you do.
01/11/2020: I sorta, kinda, maybe, might, slightly, possibly, like you.
02/10/2021: You’re going to break my heart into a million little pieces… and I’m gonna let you.
06/16/2020: Words can’t describe how much I still miss you. You didn’t deserve to die.
12/15/2020: If I could turn back time. Trust me I would, there’s nothing more I could’ve wanted.
11/25/2019: You made me need only you. And by the time I only needed you, you didn’t need me.
03/17/2020: Am I doing something wrong? You don’t seem happy with me.
06/14/2020: I still wonder what it would have felt like to kiss you.
06/15/2020: I wish you picked me. I’d give you anything I can give.
07/19/2020: I actually bought you the sweater you liked, but I couldn’t find you to give it that day.
09/23/2020: I’ve only felt confident saying or thinking “I love you” about you. No one else. I know I love you.
01/17/2021: You were my first and my only friend, and I miss you. You remind me of what I could’ve been. I wanted you to say ‘goodbye’ before leaving.
08/22/2020: I miss you a lot.
02/14/2021: I hope one day you realize how much I love you.”
I Contain Multitudes is a digital collage compiling unsent text messages I’ve collected from the Unsent Project. From 18 different people who had their first love share the same name with me, Star. 4 alphabet cutouts that when pieced together, spoke partially of strangers, and entirely of personal recollection.
Inspired by Doc Luben’s 14 Lines from Love Letters or Suicide Notes, I let words repeat themselves in spirals, creating something new from what is gone. Over and over, until I saw the rain falling outside the glass window separating me from my headspace, my chest tightening under the weight of what’s been left unsaid, of madness melting into milky memories laced with pressed wisteria. A letter to the dead, written in the words of those Unsent Project messages and arranged by my mind’s eye.
As I read the inked requiem, I woke into the divinatory psyche of names. How disjointed details come together to encapsulate who we’re destined to be. How a name isn’t just a name, but the breath of life keeping your earthen body from returning to dust.
Star, it has a pretty literal meaning. Shining light guiding the lost from Bethlehem’s heavens, or a luminous astronomical ball of gas, from a more scientific approach. Or instead an accidental shift from Sky when my mother discovered the premature firstborn cradled in her arms was at the feminine end of the spectrum. A girl left scarlet by the dawns of an Aries season, a warrior (who currently isn’t quite who she was told she would become).
When can I say my name and have it mean only my name and not what others have left behind?
The November I sat on the opposite side of a clinical psychologist last year, my books and overly casual clothing choice the accomplices of my great escape from the jailhouse I called home, sworn to secrecy to never let my mother know the truth of how I was going for therapy in lieu of my tuition lessons. “There’s a high likelihood you got Bipolar Disorder because of your mother.”
I saw it coming. Though, it took a while to recall specific incidents since selective recognition harshly developed my primary-school years into hanging photographs, its negatives damaged from long exposure to direct sunlight. Was it a kid’s temper or emotional instability? An ecstatic second nature or signs of early (hypo)mania? Children’s comfort in tears or depressive episodes?
Your past doesn’t define you, at least that’s what I thought at 7 years, 2009 when my father left my mother for another. Days later, an all too confident daughter believed she still upheld the legacy of her name, that foreshadowing of a dysfunctional family would not burn her. She would only learn much later, being ruled by Mars didn’t protect her from cold-blooded fires. Faith, hope, love – the core values of her god (though she no longer believed in them anymore) – couldn’t save her from iterations searing “fatherless, self-pitying, and sick in the head gifted child” like a birthmark on her skin.
Trauma is a strange thing, really. It makes you question, were you ever truly “normal” to begin with?
I’m writing this as I feel numb, half-dead, and empty. But reading those Unsent Project submissions and mulling over the elegies of things left unsaid…. maybe having invisible shadows of other people memorized on the back of my hand wasn’t too bad. Part of me is reminded that our personalities aren’t fixed, but dynamic. “You have adopted your best friend’s stability which is helping you quite a bit”, I remember my psychologist had said afterward.
An extract from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, 51, brings forth a message I would take the grave:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Maybe I lost myself to other people and my circumstances, whether I chose to or not. It might seem so, but it isn’t the end of a sentence, rather the beginning of a narrative I’m 98% sure I’m meant to outlast. I am all that I ever was, is, and will be. I am contradictory, I am a paradox and I am all too human. I was, and still am Star.
Tigers die and leave their skins; people die and leave their names. And until then, make sure to see yourself through until the end, to claim back your birthright or carve your fate anew.
You are large, you contain multitudes.
You are you, and for all that you are, you are loved, immensely.