38. Aftersun

Reflections on a younger self

In the new year, I’ll be digging through some old writing, revising, and sending out my favorites revamped essays. This series, From the Archives, will be available exclusively for paid subscribers. So if you’ve been thinking about subscribing, this is the time! I’ll be sharing my obsession with Free Solo, my hatred of driving (and incongruous love of the car), and the saga of a broken washing machine.

CW: Some discussion of the movie Aftersun. No explicit spoilers, but in writing about anything perhaps we always risk giving something away.

When I visit my childhood home in Indiana, my bedroom feels familiar, but no longer mine. The bunk beds are gone, two pieces of art from Goodwill still inappropriately positioned on the lime green walls, melamine shelves and a filing cabinet filled with old art projects and journals that I rarely look at. 

I keep my distance from my younger self; I return home with my guard up. I tell myself that I have a new life and new community, that I have put years of growth between who I was when I lived in this house and who I am now—I try to prevent myself from sliding back into my high school persona. She was so obstinate. So ornery and intentionally difficult, driven and perfectionistic and uncompromising. It was the only person I knew how to be then. 

I ward her off for a week; I am bright and helpful and conversational. On the eighth day at home, I wake up as myself ten years ago. I have slept in late because I watched the movie Aftersun the night before, and the film haunted me until 3am before I finally slept fitfully. When I walk out of my bedroom in the morning, everyone is already up, and I see that my family has finished the 1,000 piece puzzle—“Frog and Friends”—that I spent most of the previous day tediously working on. I am furious. I know it is an outsized reaction even as it is consuming me, but I am no longer rational. I am my high school self. 

I calm down, but I am sulky and sullen the rest of the day. I am punishing my family for their crimes. And I am punishing myself for what I so easily turned into. 

It often happens this way: I can only deny my younger self for so long. I can live in her room and pretend I don’t know her, keeping the drawers shut, books and memorabilia undisturbed. But after several days exerting energy to be civil (never hard for me outside of Indiana, and always the hardest thing when I return home), I have run myself ragged. One night of bad sleep, a movie that left me raw, and a puzzle I believed I “deserved” to finish, and I have reverted to a version of myself that I look down on. 

I tend to believe that I am always evolving beyond who I used to be. That I understand the world more, that I know myself better. I minimize my younger self this way—flatten her into a set of undesirable traits that I imagine I no longer possess. 

But once I let myself slip alongside that younger self, I stop trying to separate myself from her. Or maybe I am unable to draw the line of differentiation. 

Later in the day, I have squirreled myself away in my bedroom, and I start reading old journals from middle and high school. I wrote sporadically, but in depth. Often about my changing relationships with friends, the way I perceived my body, how I felt I had trapped myself in the image of a Good Girl. 

But I also wrote and thought in an open-ended, unselfconscious way I have trouble accessing now. I understood I was queer much younger than I remembered, and I was at peace with that knowledge, even though it would be years before I would divulge it to anyone else. I wrote extensively about my fear of death, and I tried to unpack it, to understand what I believed, having been raised by an atheist and a Christian in the same house, having gone through confirmation and then stopped going to church while still in that house.

In Aftersun, the movie that kept me awake, we observe the world mostly from a child’s perspective. It’s the late 1990s, and eleven-year-old Sophie videorecords her vacation to Turkey with her almost-31-year old father Calum. Every shot is tender and incandescent, capturing light in the way only film can. 

As viewers, we are caught in a world between memory and lived experience. Time feels infinite and stretched out in the long days of summer. But we are hurtling toward the end of the vacation, the end of Sophie’s childhood, and toward a much bigger loss.

Through it all, Sophie documents everything: interviewing her father and herself on the digital video camera, snapping photos underwater, posing for a polaroid at dinner the last night of vacation. When, in a heavy moment, her father makes her stop recording during one conversation, she says she’ll record the conversation in her “little mind camera.” 

Sophie does so much work to preserve moments and freeze time. In a painfully ironic way, she succeeds: in her fragmented memory, an adult Sophie meets her father frozen in the clothes he wore when the two part ways at the airport. Sophie has aged two decades, but in the liminal space where she recalls her vacation and her father, he stays the same age. 

I found the film deeply moving, far and away the best thing I watched in the last year. Part of what the director Charlotte Wells conveyed so successfully to me was the sadness of not knowing or not understanding someone. The pain of loving a person who is in anguish, not understanding their anguish, and not being able to save them. But the other piece that knocked me down was the expectation that time and age grant us perspective and understanding, when, often, we remain in the dark.  

When adult Sophie and her father meet in the strobe-light dream state of her memory, she does not suddenly understand him. The chasm between them is still vast. And yet, through Sophie’s memory, we still see moments of intimacy and love between parent and child, all of that still real and warm and tender, even as Calum shields Sophie from a darkness that eventually swallows him. We see the intensity of Sophie’s experience, the chemistry between her and her father, the spectrum of each of their emotions, which never feel childish to me—instead, as consuming, particular, and complex as my emotions feel now. 

When I slip back into myself as a kid, when I snap at my parents or fall into an old pattern, I often think I am reverting to someone worse. I expect to react better and understand more now that I’m older, and I find that much of the time, I do not. In so many ways, I am still my younger self—a girl who surprises me by how much she understood, how deeply she felt things, while my current self surprises me by how much she still doesn’t understand.

Fortnightly Faves

1. This essay by Isabel Kaplan which I absolutely loved. (Side note: I learned I have definitely misused Nora Ephron’s “Everything is copy,” but I think I’ve decided I don’t care.)

2. And Isabel Kaplan’s novel NSFW (the success of which in part spurred the above essay). I couldn’t put it down, and though I have some critiques, I thought it was well-written and highly addictive.

3. This essay in response to the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act by Lux Alptraum who writes The B+ Squad. Not writing an essay about marriage right now, but Alptraum really nailed a lot of my thoughts on why the RFMA isn’t as progressive as it might seem and all the issues we should take with marriage as an institution.

4. This long (and very worth it) read in the New Yorker on some important issues and stories in the climate space right now. Some of it is a little doomsday-y, but perhaps the appropriate amount. After all, as the article’s author Elizabeth Kolbert quotes Greta Thunberg, “You can’t just sit around waiting for hope to come…You don’t seem to understand that hope is something you have to earn.”

5. This interview with Sabrina Imbler on Gender Reveal. I first started reading Imbler when they wrote a Catapult column in 2018 and I’ve read a bunch of their work since then. Haven’t had a chance to read their memoir yet (How Far the Light Reaches) but excited to dive in.

6. I got to listen to Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You on vinyl for the first time and ugh I love it even more than I did through my headphones.