Hello, My Shadow Self

I suppose everyone hits a certain point in their life at which they look back on the photos of themselves as a twenty-something and see a stranger. Or at least someone they are curious about, someone they want to remember being. There is this photo of me and my brother the year we lost her--me newly 24, my brother still 20--at the beach on Cumberland Island. We are both bent over the ruined remains of a sand castle, now a lumpy pile of mud in the tide, focused with the intensity of young children creating something in their minds. The long sprawl of beige sand meets the angled white line of the tide, the ocean-sky pale blue spreads out behind us in a way that is both lonely and comforting to the observer. It's just us out here in this desert wilderness by the sea, feet squashed down into the sad, knees bent, heads tilted down. You can see that Joey's hair is recently buzzed and grown out all over so that he is on the verge of resembling a dandelion gone to seed. Mine is long and pulled up in a pony tail.

I want to remember what is was like to have long hair and not be afraid all the time of pulling it out, to be effortlessly slender like that and not worry the way I worry now. Is that what being young is about? Being carefree? Do we actually accrue more things to worry about as we get older (mortgages, child rearing), or do we just become more well-versed in worrying the more sadness life shows us?

Maybe the better-sweeter-younger of nostalgia is a lie; maybe things weren't easier back then. Maybe I was just as anxious as I am now. But even though I was scared to lose my mother, I didn't know what that would feel like; we had nothing to compare it to. That's a nostalgia I would gladly return to, a knowledge I would gladly do without.

In the distance under a straw hat, I'm sure she crinkled up her gaze on us, content to watch us playing in the sun. Too thin, but smiling big. Still behind the tipping point at which the animal on your heels overtakes you. We left that idyllic beach vacation and went out into the world like birds tagged for recapture, not guessing that she'd be nothing but ash just four months later. There was the lilt of springtime unfurling in the air. We were all eyes and hearts dancing full of big-city dreams and meanderings and falling in and out of love and all the while her last summer was a coal truck rattling down a mountain behind a blind curve toward an impact that nothing could stop.

How could I have fallen in love?

I look at that picture and try to summon from it who I was then. Sketch in a background of all I couldn't see, or didn't want to. A dark incantation of longing: Tell me, image of my younger self, why is wanting my mother back as much as I want her back not good enough to bring her back, and why can I not accept this? In The Vampire Diaries, they keep showing this flashback segment where the psycho-vampire-witch-doppelganger hot dude says "hello, my shadow self." That's what I feel like, like there's a shadow self living inside me, or maybe two, that together we form some semblance of a whole; a trinity of self-like beings. There's the girl in the photo, sarcastic but not yet jaded. Another girl who goes to work in the morning, comes home at night, just got married, is living anyperson's life. Then there's the tiny splinter of a girl who believes that longing is powerful enough to precipitate a shift in the universe, sending out filaments of despair to snake their way up into the stars and bring back what is lost. If I can just go back to the places we went together, I think, I'll find her somewhere, buried in the sand, or haunting a red room in the French Quarter. Cumberland Island, Maine, New Orleans, Charleston, Cold Spring Harbor. The docks and beaches and broken city streets of her. If I can rediscover who I was back then, if I can just return to myself, I'll somehow be able to return her to me.

Now I realize that the third self is really me; if the other two exist, do they matter if this faintest wisp of shadow-hope is etched into the iron core of who I am? Maybe I'm also coming to realize that I'll never be a real person until I stop hanging on to all these shadows and start to believe that redemption is found in the future, not in the past.