Whispers in the waves

Against the waves crashing, two distinctly New Jersey looking girls, and you can decide for yourself what that means, talk about people they know.

“I wonder how she puts up with the Kennedys.”

“I knowwww.”

“Melanie, well, she’s just so tan and thin. But she’s the most down-to-earth. We were at that thing the other night. She showed up late, I think she had a game. She never goes out. And she asked me to go to the bathroom with her. Like only she could get away with that.”

“Yah it would be weird if that was like Grace asking you to go to the bathroom. But with Melanie it’s like kinda normal.”

Laughter.

“Oh! Greg responded.”

“What did he say?”

“I don’t know, like I don’t even know what he was trying to say.”

“Weird.”

Now, Melanie, as they took great care in elucidating, seemed to be this intriguing blend of sun-kissed and waif-thin — yet paradoxically grounded in her being. She was, according to one of our beachside narrators, quite the anomaly in their circle for her aversion to social gallivanting. This Melanie, whose reputation seemed to precede her, had the unique ability to turn a seemingly mundane request — such as a bathroom trip accompaniment — into a significant, ponderable event. And I was hooked.

This sounds excessively eavesdroppy on my part. To be clear I had no intention of listening. Something about the disharmonious and obtrusive voices forced my focus away from DFW’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. And now it seems fitting in hindsight as I recount a story about a story which stole my attention away from another story about a story in typical DFW metafictional mindfuck.

So I thought about why a siren song of tedium concerning people whom I knew nothing about and whom I would never know grabbed me. I wanted to know why Melanie’s bathroom buddy request left such an indelible mark. Why it contributed to a construction of her — both critical and consistent — that the two Jersey girls felt obligated to uphold.

What I soon found myself grappling with was a quasi-philosophical question, not about certain persons capable of socially-acceptable requests for bathroom partners, but the nature of decidedly mundane chatter about people for which I lack any conceivable connection upstream of reason to give a shit. Experiences like these lead you to think about the things said about you on random beaches in New Jersey. The whispers in the waves. The things told about you by people who know you, or at least think as much. Do these accounts told by self-appointed narrators match or even resemble your view of yourself?

I suppose it doesn’t much matter — in any practical sense at least. You walk among, talk among, spend time among other people. Then you hand them the keys. They take what you’ve given them, although sometimes not even, and write your narrative for you. No, about you. You can take that as reason enough for a form of DGAF determinism granting you license to irreverently stomp around selectively blind to the consequences. This perspective comes off a bit disheartening and perhaps even a touch nihilistic to the naked eye.

But I find it liberating. It frees you to concern yourself less with the co-opting of your story because you’ve resigned yourself to the little control you can ever exercise over others. After all, your only spokespersons in the chambers of their brains are mere spectres of yourself envisaged as much in the image of the creators themselves as of you or anything you’ve done or anything you’ve said. Some Frankenstein’s monster of you and your whisperers, strewn together haphazardly because why the hell should they mind what they say about you with any real attention or care. It’s not their own images of themselves we’re talking about here.

And here I am, presiding over my thoughts on the cusp of a realization, much like one stands on the edge of the ocean — toes wet and desperate for the sharp coolness of the waves as they recede. Within these interwoven tales of bathroom visits and oblique references to social conventions, I'm nudged towards a greater truth behind all the layers of untruths. If you were to sit and deeply consider, in that way where your thoughts start feeling like one of those Russian dolls within dolls, you'd realize the staggering weight we place on perceptions, judgments, and half-formed tales told by those who barely know the real stories. But there's also this bizarre liberation in acknowledging the unbridled chaos of narrative control. So much told, even more untold.

Consider this: every person you meet, from the barista to the childhood friend, possesses a version of you in their head. A simulacrum, constructed from moments, utterances, laughs, missteps, triumphs, insults. And each version differs, sometimes subtly, sometimes glaringly, from the next. You could, if you wanted to, try and shepherd these perceptions, laboriously nudging them towards some "true" reflection of your essence. But here's the rub: you're as much the curator of a museum filled with imprecise sculptures of yourself as you are the sculptor.

This realization, however jarring at first, can be an emancipator. For it isn’t about a callous disregard for what others think, nor an invitation to narcissistic self-obsession. Rather, it’s an acceptance of the duality of being both the subject and the chronicler. Melanie and the Jersey girls.

The whispers in the waves recede with the tide while you remain standing, witness to it all.