By Elisa Penha

Edited by Ellena Lu and Alloe Mak

I own five copies of Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief. 

One illustrated, one original cover, two Empire State Building box set covers, and one new cover. I cannot wait for my children to inherit them. Everything that comes into my possession, from the disposable camera photos to the stuffed animals that I collect ceaselessly is something I think about passing down. I am a transitory period—only holding onto material objects as safekeeping until my descendants can take them from me. I work to make my jewellery meaningful to me so that it may be an heirloom to my children, so that they may tell their friends about their mother, who she is, who she was, who she loved. 

I wonder if it is tiring to live this way. To fret over every decision I make with the perspective of somebody recounting it to someone else years after I’ve died. I wonder what will be left of me. When I grow old and pass down my posters to my children to decorate their walls instead of mine—when it is not my CD collection but theirs. When they’ve worn out the video games I gifted them—vintage games, by then, which will probably be worth more than what I bought them for. And I’ll urge them to continue handing them down. To keep every inkling of my personhood alive as time goes on. 

I can’t help but worry about my legacy. About disappearing. About my memory going somewhere I can’t follow. The hero Achilles demanded he be laid to rest with his lover Patroclus so that Patroclus’ memory did not die while his lived on because to the Ancient Greeks, death was not true until you were forgotten. I think I agree with them. I want so desperately to create something worth being left behind, to be lost and found again. It’s a sort of necromancy—to let yourself be lost to time and dug up again when it seemed your ghost had finally stopped its haunting. Isn’t that what archaeology is for? Unearthing the past and raising the dead? Preserving the ruins of Pompeii and rebinding Shakespeare’s original manuscripts, never to be touched by ungloved hands, but to have some proof of the passage of time. 

I had rumours spread about me when I was younger and I don’t think I can recall a more helpless feeling. That there existed, and still exists, impressions of me in the minds of others that I have no control over. False narratives about a person who isn’t real, and whose fictionalized stories have somehow been accredited to me. I know that some people don’t care. As long as they know the truth and as long as the people who matter know the truth, why should it make a difference if somebody entirely insignificant subscribes to some juvenile rumour? But I cannot think this way. Every thought someone has of me is something that can taint which memories of me will live on in time. If I don’t snub out the inaccuracies—if I don’t work tirelessly to be sure everybody’s thoughts of me are up-to-date and exactly as I want them to be, who knows what kind of legacy I could be leaving to fly perilously into the future? I often wished I’d been more diligent in keeping a diary as a child, and sometimes, I still try (fruitlessly) to keep a diary now. It would have kept my side of life perfectly intact. I could have pointed to pages and read verbatim quotes and shoved them obnoxiously down everybody’s throat, to swallow me whole. This is who I am, I’d say. This is who you should remember. Me as I designed. 

I always make a point to sit on the curb of my old house whenever I walk around the neighbourhood I used to live in. My old home has been knocked down and replaced, and it’s been three years since I moved, but I am still rather territorial about the place. It’s a vain admission, but I don’t like that this part of my life which was so unequivocally mine has simply gone on without me. I want to sit there on the curb and tell every car that drives by: they knocked down the cherry tree in the yard—I used to climb it and pick its fruit with my sister every summer. They’ve moved the side of the house that the door was on. And this is where my bedroom used to be. They’ve patched up this part of the cracked concrete walkway. And this is where my neighbour and I met up every day after school. I tied my bike to this post. I sat on this stump in the cold when I accidentally forgot my key. These are my memories and you—new homeowners, new neighbours, new passersby—are just walking around in them. This is my legacy, and you didn’t take off your shoes before you wandered inside, so now the floors are tracked with your muddy footsteps. How am I supposed to bring my children here now? How am I supposed to relive my childhood and cling to desperate nostalgia if environments change while I don’t? It isn’t fair that I need to continue remembering the past while evidence of its existence melts into nonexistence and antimatter. I should have become famous sooner so that my home could have been transformed into some kind of self-aggrandizing museum like Shakespeare’s house still standing in Stratford-upon-Avon or the tragic Winchester Mystery House. Let my walls keep breathing with me and my mundanities. Hoard and piece me together again once I am gone. I promise I’ll have more to give. 

It’s not an uncommon longing to wish you could observe your own funeral. To be sure everybody you wanted to show up showed up. To listen to what they have to say; what they decided was most important about you to mention in their speeches. Was it something about how I was always quick with a book recommendation, or did you say instead how I took birthday gifts way too seriously? What of mine are you passing down? I think, sometimes, about the people in my life, and how perhaps my compulsive need to curate what they think of me is tainting the authenticity of how they will carry my legacy. But, just as probably, this precise curation is part of me all the same. I don’t like not knowing what people think of me. It gives far too much leeway for something I don’t approve of to slip through the grates and be sewn into the fabric of the universe. But maybe this doesn’t have to be as damning a fate as I have for so long thought it would be. Maybe the legacies that I did not have the liberty of proofreading are the ones I should treat as most precious. Tim Kreider told us about the mortifying ordeal of being known, and now I wonder about the mortifying ordeal of being remembered. If I want those who live on after me to know I was an excellent bestower of second chances, I may have to accept that they will also know I could never argue without crying. If I want my stories of triumph over fake friends to survive, so must the times when I was the guilty party. The impulsive and rude, rather than the compassionate victim. My memory would be disingenuous if I kept my faults behind a safeguard—though it is oh-so-tempting. But when I knock that safeguard down and show my failed math tests alongside my honour roll diplomas, at least then I’ll know the person I’ve decided to let live on was the fullest version of myself there was. 

To whoever finds my decade-old yearbooks and prom photos in a thrift shop—know that I was caring. Know that I liked to make my boyfriend paper-made arts and crafts and that I’ve failed to pick up the guitar an embarrassing number of times thanks entirely to my unenviable lack of discipline. Know that I love concerts and that I’m rather pretentious about my music taste—though I try not to let it show.

I want to be remembered. However my memory decides to have me. I’ll take the good with the bad if it means I get to hang around just a while longer than anticipated. Because I quite like it here, and I’m not going without a fight.