A Dotted Line.

I’m in the process of applying to a Graduate program, and needed to request my Undergraduate transcripts. This prompted me to attempt logging on to my old Blackboard account and accessing my FSU email. After many a try, I successfully got in, and I’ve spent the past day digging around college Christianna’s memorialized conversations on the internet (frightening, mostly). I’ve oscillated between cringing at the desperate emails sent to professors asking them for just “a bit more time, I promise I don’t do this often” and proudly reading some of the papers I turned in late (not proud of that part, but…), accepting the five point penalties so that I could turn in something I believed in.

I know that I have an innate ability to write. It’s hard for me to say that without feeling like a jackass, but I’m working on celebrating who I am and the things I’m good at. Going through my old papers was a beneficial exercise and a gentle reminder for me. It reminded me that I’ve always felt and thought deeply, and that’s always been okay (even though in high-school I felt it was embarrassing, and most definitely NOT okay). My imagination is wild and I mostly love where it leads me. My brain tries its best to keep up and feels overwhelmed a lot of the time, but it doesn’t stop trying to understand and empathize. I’ve been broken and patched together over and over and over again, just like we all have. I felt that way years ago, and I feel that way now.

Anyways, I stumbled across this paper I wrote, inspired by Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: a work of electronic hypertext, interactive in nature, that continues the story of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from the viewpoint of a companion to Frankenstein, brought to life by Mary Shelley herself. I don’t know exactly what the prompt was for this assignment, but my paper was met with feedback from my professor that included “Definitely a different approach to the topic at hand! Imagination, writing and weaving is great here. But it’s just a tiny bit short of two full pages.” It’s okay, 20-year-old Christianna. Your imagination remains in tact ten years later, and your short-changed paper didn’t come back to haunt you like you probably felt it would at the time. So, here’s some imagination that I hope is relatable!

You’re overlooking your own stitch marks. I must realize that I am not wholly me. If I was, in fact, even whole to begin with. Which I’m not. I never will be. I watch helplessly, yet with amusement, as various authors sew their own patches of influence and being onto my already stitched body. My father stitched on his smile long ago. My eyes reveal the seams of my mother’s steady hand. My belief in good, in humanity, is constantly being sewn, ripped apart, and re-stitched, until I have so many different scars on my body that I become overwhelmed and cower in fear. What do they see when they look at me? Is it the mangled patchwork I attribute to the interactions and events of daily life that continually re-shape me?

I am a fabric of relations. I am not a solitary being, nor am I a single-faceted entity, restricted to only one dimension of the life that unfolds interminably all around me. I saw, felt, heard and smelt at the same time. I shatter the MacBook screen, comprised of pixels and source codes that keep me from experiencing the tangible, the aromatic, the visual. I am a palpable patchwork girl now, with the world at my fingertips. How lucky am I, that the scent of my grandmother’s homemade zucchini bread stitches its own patch onto my being; one that will forever remind me of her steadfast patience as she taught me to bake in her kitchen?

I realize that I am a self, composed of many selves, a work of many pens, a quilt of many needles. Who I am goes beyond the personal convictions and boundaries of my inherent being. In fact, the self is only a threshold, a door…between two multiplicities. I do not fit into a box. I am I or me or Christianna, but I am also so much a product of others and how they choose to relate to me. I am the canvas, the foundation; but he and she and it and they are the artists and the authors and the seamstresses who assemble and reassemble and disassemble me.

Aren’t you the very demon of multiplicity? Each patch added to my ever-changing corporality is a building block, a kind of immortality that I now possess and hold dear to my being, attributed to the innumerable authors who have left their marks sewn into my skin. Come apart into different signatures. The reciprocity of this interaction is something beautiful to me. Just as I am a patchwork, I possess the ability to stitch my own convictions and beliefs and physical attributes (one day) into another. A symbiotic relationship with the world and its inhabitants is there for the taking, and I cherish the opportunity for growth that I can both personally experience and help cultivate through interactions and relations.

If you touch me, your flesh is mixed with mine, and if you pull away, you may take some of me with you, and leave a token behind. My time here is transient. The amalgamation of each of my patches into one unified and impermeable being is impossible, and my seams will always be evident.

I am a discontinuous trace, a dotted line. A dotted line demonstrates. Even what is discontinuous and in pieces can blaze a trail. I am powerful in my brokenness, and from my stitches and pieces I draw bits of strength that culminate in a fortitude I would not have alone. I am a product of the past, the present and the future; I am not all here, and never will be, because the patches of my being will forever, as long as I am on this earth, be at the hands of the authors who piece me together…hence without shape, without end, without story. Or with as many stories as I can put together.