ESSAY ON CHANGE

No one has ever proved to me that they can truly change. And maybe it is selfish for me to feel entitled to somebodies’ metamorphosis, feel as though they would alter their behaviour simply because they love me.

But love is never enough. And I will believe that until the day I die, because a person’s true change can only be spurred by a turning point. When they reach the edge, when they lose everything, when they themselves suffer, is when they alter themselves, and it is never an act of selflessness because we are human. We are human and therefore selfish.

When I was 15, I told myself I loved this boy, he told me he loved me to. But I would watch him day after day, week after week choose other girls over me, and I thought to myself- is this love? And I prayed that it wasn’t, because surely if it was real I would feel it.

If I told you he was transgender maybe you would count it as change, but in reality, he was still the same person. He treated me the same and still flirted with his friends, and as for physical change? He’s not ready for that yet. But does an altered appearance change the sound of his laugh? The look in his eyes when he cared? The words he said when he didn’t? And when we broke up it wasn’t because he had become a different person, it was because he had always been the same and I had been too blind to see it.

I don’t talk to him anymore. I watch from afar as he laughs and lives his life without me but with everyone else. He is happy now, I think, surrounded by the girls that hate me because of him and the friends that forgave him over time. And on the rare occasion that I hear his voice I realise that I still know him, I know his favourite colour and the name of his cat, I know how he hates what he sees in the mirror. And I fall asleep every night wishing that he had changed- because at least then we could truly be strangers. But I also wonder why he couldn’t change for me. Why he couldn’t put me first before anyone else.

On the other hand, there are days when I feel change all around me. Even now watching the leaves fade from green to orange and fall from the trees, they are so sure of their slow evolution. My little brother is growing older and taller and apart from me while I struggle to reach him, my friends transforming into stronger and better people. I realise I am the girl who cut her hair and changed her makeup because the boy she wanted fell for a prettier girl, and I am also the girl with a sense of humour and a tougher shell. My ex-boyfriend who used to tell me I was the one, has his messages deleted on my phone. I watch parties I would have been invited to play out on friend’s stories and posts and wish I were there. I am jealous of the person I used to be and yet I prefer the person I have become because of her. But as I watch the world move around me and pretend that there are people affected by losing me as much as I was affected by losing them, as we stop making eye contact because I am the only one left looking, as I fight to live in the past because it seems better than the present, I am stuck in a loop that will never change.

And this is my undeniable paradox. People do not change for you; in many ways they change without you. And you change too. And just because I watch the people I love grow without me doesn’t mean they are static. But internally, in some dark and hidden place, we are all the children who played with sand and crayons on the playground. We are still the lovers and the poets and the people we have always been. He is still the boy I fell in love with, and I am still the girl who loves to paint. Everyone has access to the façade we think is ‘change’, but whether they show you the version of themselves that has and forever will remain untouched and unaltered, is up to them. We are under the delusion of change because we have not tried to get to know the person behind it.