Rose: I have chai with my breakfast everyday.

Bud: Excited for my friend’s birthday party the day after tomorrow. I have not seen a soul from Parkland in almost half a year.

Thorn: My sister took over my bedroom and now I sleep in the guest bedroom till I move back to college 😭🥲

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I was at Costco today. Oh how I missed Costco. Who doesn’t want bulk peanut butter and a lawn mower in neighboring aisles? That’s the dream! 

I was there for the important work though of course (samples). I got to a lady handing out Lindt chocolate and she placed a couple of them on tiny paper cups out on the tray. 

“Which one?”

I didn’t even look. “Darkest one you’ve got, please.” 

I bit into it. That familiar, slightly bitter taste filled my mouth, the kind that makes your jaw tingle just a little with how ALMOST gross it is. 

I remembered that I don’t even like dark chocolate. I mean, I do. I lied to you. I actually love it, it’s my favorite ever. But only because it’s my mom’s favorite. It was the only kind in our house, so it became the only kind I knew, and later, the only kind I wanted. 

A preference, absorbed through osmosis. A tiny piece of someone else, now a fixed point in my own taste.

It got me thinking, for the rest of my lap around the warehouse, about who or what else I’m a mosaic of. Not talking about the big, obvious inheritances, like my beliefs or values or traumas that have been drilled into me through speech or life-altering events. More so the smaller things, the souvenirs people left behind in my hairs, my senses, my favorites. 

Like, off the top of my head: 

• I look for orange in sunsets now. I hated orange. Like I could have the hots for the Lorax if he was purple or something. But why orange ew. Then someone I loved once told me their favorite color was the soft, dusty orange of just-after-sunset sky. I don’t think I even liked it then. But I started looking for it, to understand. Now I can’t see a sunset without scanning for it. When I find it, I think of them. A whole person, contained in a sliver of light.
• I am a hugeeee Billy Joel fan. And every single time a song of his comes on, I think of the first friend I made in college. They were the one who put me on. We don’t talk anymore. The memory isn’t sad, or even particularly detailed. It’s just… there. A ghost in the melody.
• I knock on wood. If there’s no wood around, I tap my own head. A friend once told me her mom would joke that her head was made of wood. That image made me laugh and sometimes even when there’s wood around I’ll knock on my head just because it makes me smile. 

These are the only ones I could think of substantially at 11:41 pm when I was supposed to be asleep at 8:00 pm (jet lag is wondrous). 

But that’s to say that we’re all walking archives of other people. A mosaic of everyone and everything we ever loved. Our favorites are rarely our own. They are hand-me-downs, gifts, inside jokes that outlived the friendship. They are the sample-size versions of a soul, offered on a tiny paper cup, that we decided to keep. 

And realizing this made me realize something else, something painfully obvious:

I love to be perceived.

Not in an egotistical way (although you gotta admit a little narcissism never hurt anyone :)) It’s the fragments that hook me. I am  fascinated by the idea of what pieces of me might be rattling around in someone else’s life. What song comes on and makes them, for a half-second, think of a joke I told? What food do they avoid because I once made a face? What turn of phrase did they pick up from me without noticing?

Positive or negative, it doesn’t really matter. What others think of me is, frankly, none of my business. But the idea that we leave these intangible, carbon-copy traces on each other? That’s so cool, so human of us. 

And if you’ve made it this far, I have one ask of you. If anything in your life, a song, a color, a brand of overly-bitter chocolate, whispers a reminder of me, I’d love to know. I’m trying to draw a map of where I’ve been using the things people remember.

We really are all just collecting each other, one sample at a time.