The Not-Me

A while ago I read How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran. It's a book about a fourteen-year-old girl who embarrasses herself so profoundly on a local TV talk show that she sees no other choice for her life but to recreate herself entirely. Since then, I've been thinking about who I would become if I could ever unbecome myself. It's comforting, the existence of this hypothetical other me. I like imagining that somewhere out there is a woman living a life I un-have.

This not-me would wear high-heeled black boots that end just below the knee, which I don't wear now because they make me look like a dominatrix, and patterned skirts that hit me mid-thigh. (If I can invent an entirely new woman to take over my body, I'm certainly not going to give her any of my current insecurities.) I'd invent a formal gown with built-in pajamas and a ten-gallon hat with an actual ten-gallon aquarium. I'd have a constant headache, but at least I'd get to secretly spend all day in my jammy-jams.

I haven't decided whether I would chop off all my hair--a friend once suggested I'd look cute with inch-long curls--or grow it out so long that I could just whip it unabashedly in people's faces when they annoyed me. The mere thought of maintaining said hair exhausts me, but I have to remember that it might not exhaust not-me. In fact, not-me might love nothing more than clogging the drain with dark brown baseball-sized hair nests and being mistaken for the business end of a donkey.

I would have some cool, impressive job like museum curator or the person who holds the clapperboard before every take during a movie shoot. I would live in a modern geometric eyesore of an apartment and fill the garden with only yellow flowers. I'd host lavish dinner parties where I'd serve pretentious things like carrot foam that you pump out of a lotion bottle.

I would have a friend in every country in the world, so if I ever wanted to ride a yak in Kazakhstan or gamble away my fortunes in Monaco, I'd have somewhere to stay. My friends would all know me down to the soul, and most of them would take the fall if I ever hacked a government official's emails.

In my spare time I would throw large objects into nearby lakes to see how long it would take to raise the water levels by at least a foot. I would learn to sing Don McLean's "American Pie" backwards. I'd collect antique doorknobs and use them to build a door that no one could open.

I would never write a blog post about alternate selves because I would have exactly the life I wanted.