At the red light

I love to drive, but I need the windows down. Mine in the driver’s seat rolled all the way down or just a crack in the backseat. Whichever window, I need the air. 

I need the air for the wind to dishevel my blown-out curtain bangs on the way home from the hairdresser. I need the air so I can hear Seoul outside my car, the honking and the conversations. I need it so that at the red light, I can look out and lock eyes with a little girl standing on a corner with a blue backpack and long pigtails. I also make eye contact with whoever’s in the Lexus next to me, because they also have their windows down. Which is rare for some reason but feels intimate enough to throw me off. At this point, I, of course, have something embarrassing playing, because my Spotify is on shuffle and that means we’re going genre blind. And taste blind. It’s also probably blaring way too loud, and the next moment they’re rolling their windows back up because they’re uncultured and can’t appreciate the Y2K headbanger that is “You’ll Always Find Your Way Back Home” (from “Hannah Montana: The Movie.”)

After a small eternity, the light turns green and my new friend and I head our separate ways. I will likely never see this person again, and the only piece of their life I partook in was this everlasting (for all of 15 seconds) impression of my super underground and alt music taste. 

Most of the time, I yearn for anonymity. All public perceptions of me would ideally be fleeting. Once in a while, I plot my rise to world fame and itemize what will eventually be displayed in my personal museum. 

Anonymity, for me, will forever be synonymous to the rise and fall of Ask.fm in middle school. Giving pre-teens a platform to go incognito to send and publicize messages for each other is probably one of the worst ideas anyone has ever had. Someone once wrote on my profile that I was too fake and listened to bad music. Maybe the Lexus driver will agree with the latter. They also made a few other snarky comments about my clothes and personality that I now do not recall. 

Anyways, after I read this anonymous, grammatically incorrect criticism (“your fake” and not “you’re fake.”) I was in shambles. I deleted my Ask.fm account and started trying to be less “fake,” whatever that meant, which only manifested itself through further performative consciousness and premeditated interactions. So, basically, I was twelve years old and acting faker than however fake I was before, because I didn’t want to be perceived as fake. Then, at one point, I threw my hands in the air, said f*ck you, anonymous Ask.fmer and decided to stop caring. 

Except, I didn’t say it in those words because I didn’t swear in middle school, and I don’t know that I ever got any “realer” than I was at twelve. If anything, I’ll bet I’m less honest with myself now than I was back then. 

A while ago, I went to a bookstore with a boy who told me I should read more nonfiction instead of only reading fiction all the time – like biographies because you can follow someone’s lead and learn everything about the way they’ve lived. We drank almond lattes, pet someone’s very large dog, and when we left, he got me a NYT-bestselling memoir that I read on a flight a couple of weeks later. I probably could have gotten a lot more out of it if I wasn’t in such a cynical mood and pondering how perception-aware the writer must have been, how much of his own narrative was the full truth and how much of it would have gotten him labeled as “fake” if he lived in the time of Ask.fm. 

So, back to this world-fame alternative and my personal museum. The plan is zero insight into the way I’ve lived, but personal memorabilia, my comfort mugs, maybe. Maybe some short pieces of writing that are hopefully more pensive and impressive than this one, and something I’ll paint on a genius whim when I’m thirty. When I was little, I used to love to paint because I liked mixing the colors. Red and blue makes purple, and the sun always goes in the upper left-hand corner. I’d never get the perfect shade of purple on my first try, so I’d waste all this red and blue paint and then I'd spiral. 

I’ll probably stick with the anonymity, to be honest. My journals will probably have to be demolished because there’s very little in there that’s biography material and many, many things that should never see the light of day. 

Though on odd occasions, I find myself scratching out sentences because I feel they come across as too mean, too weak or too delusional and that kind of perception would horrify me. Even though no one will ever read it. Even though I can roll up my car windows any time I want.