Future Genetic Collaborator,

If you think you’re curbing my enthusiasm with these little interludes, you are dead wrong. Dead wrong. I do try to restrain myself, you have to know that, but when you write, it inspires a little burst of manic, creative pleasure that I can’t help but share. Immediately.

It tickles me to know that you also accumulate small collections of letter fragments. Your reasons are different from mine, but all the same, it’s yet another secret shared something that we weren’t aware of until this very moment.

I want to talk more about this personal progress idea, even though it is entirely possible that we have beat it into the ground at this point, I with my flatlining and you with your endearing self-aggrandizing (oh, don’t take offense, lover—you deserve some aggrandizing). After reading your response(s) to this issue, though, something new (or at the very least, new in a Clive way) occurs to me. There was a theme that you kept trying out in different keys, about being static, but in a dynamic sort of way, or frantically changing in the same ways, or forever progressing in a thousand different directions from the same point. Something along those lines.

And what occurs to me that did not occur to my former self (AKA Debbie Downer) is that the line is flat, but not futilely so. We—as in you and I—sometimes become frustrated, I think, at the fact that for all our ambitious laundry lists of change, we remain the same in all the important ways. As you said, we really are still the people from our childhood photos

(and I must fugue here a little, and tell you that during my most recent time home, I had the task of sorting through several crates of my old belongings, and found a photo album that I’d made from a trip I took with my Mom when I was around 6 years old, and that the thing that struck me most about the photos was how unabashedly joyful I was, and I wondered for a moment what the trajectory was, exactly, that has taken me from that point to this one)

in the most consequential ways. Debbie Downer, in her ignorance (which I now scorn and distance myself from) assumed that this indicated that progress was an illusion. But you hit on something with the idea of self-acceptance. Perhaps the reality of ourselves doesn’t change, but our view of that reality does change. And with that comes a thousand microscopic mutations in our internal and external experiences that make this progression far from futile.

As in, I buy all the same kinds of books that I did when I was a freshman in college. But I do it now because I want to read them, not because I want to buy them, or own them, or be seen with them. As in, I have all the same discussions about favorite movies, and music, and authors, but they are about the pleasure of mutual self-disclosure rather than self-presentation.

As in, I’ve always had hidden, repressed portions of myself, but they are intimate opportunities rather than shameful secrets. Once, I went to see a movie by myself (which movie isn’t relevant), as I am wont to do, and when I returned to my apartment complex, I didn’t immediately get out of the car. Seeing movies late at night, and in a publically isolated sort of way, always feels mildly dissociating for me (but not in an unpleasant sense), and I needed a moment to collect myself. I flipped down the mirror from the visor above my seat, and looked at my reflection. It was an odd moment. I recognized my face, but it didn’t look familiar. I stared at myself, and as I watched, my visage changed. I saw my mother, and then I saw my father. For a moment, and only a moment, I grasped what it meant to be the product of two unique sets of DNA. I looked, and in a moment of true (fear? panic?) enlightenment, I saw that I was simultaneously beautiful, and terribly disfigured. I noticed the dilation of my pupils (and isn’t this exactly how Dorian Gray must have felt looking at his portrait?), and then I realized that my own movements were slightly out of sync with those of my reflection. I frowned, and it did as well, but not at precisely the same moment. I started to form my mouth into a smile, and the reflection’s pantomime was terrifying. I remembered a dialogue from a movie I’d once seen about doppelgangers, which in turn made me think of Freud’s writing on the unheimlich, and I remembered that someone had once said (and maybe it was Freud) that things are uncanny when they are and simultaneously are not. Precocious children (at once children and not, adults and not), zombies (alive and not, dead and not, human and not), and mirror images (you and not you): all are unheimlich (which, ironically, means both unheimlich and also heimlich). My reflection, which was both me and not, was both adult and childlike, masculine and feminine, my mother and my father, real and imagined--


--repressed and denied.

Unheimlich: German; literally, “un-home-ly.”
Refers to experiencing an object as at once familiar and alien.
Derived from the word
“heimlich:”
1. homey, familiar
2. concealed, deceptive