Chapter Six: The Multiplication of Selves

Chapter Six: The Multiplication of Selves

By the time I was seventeen I was, in some functional sense, several people. There was the Hur who was with Layla: attentive, present, practicing the grammar of a relationship he had entered genuinely and was maintaining with genuine feeling. This Hur was real. There was the Hur who was with Sana: intellectually alive in a different way, pulled toward something that felt like recognition — the experience of being seen with accuracy rather than with love's generous distortion. This Hur was also real. There was the Hur who had been in a slow-building conversation with Nadia since class 9 — a friendship that had begun with homework questions and evolved, through the gradual accumulation of unguarded moments, into something that neither of us had formally named because naming it would require decisions that were easier deferred. Nadia was my age, my class, my level. She had been the first girl to message me first, which had felt significant, which I had stored as significant without knowing what to do with the significance. There was the Hur who had said no to the girl who proposed directly — who had stood in front of an act of extraordinary courage and declined it, and who turned this over some nights with the specific discomfort of a decision that cannot be appealed. And there was the Hur who contained all of these Hurs and knew about all of them and was beginning, in the private hours, to wonder if being several people simultaneously was freedom or if it was the opposite of freedom — if it was the most elaborate prison he had yet constructed, one built entirely from the inside.

*** I want to describe a specific evening. An evening I think about with more frequency than I can account for. I had just come back from a long phone call with Layla. The call had been good — warm, easy, the kind of conversation that makes you feel the rightness of the thing you have with a person, the accumulated texture of two years of knowing someone building itself into something you can feel the solidity of when you hold it. I was sitting on the edge of my bed after hanging up, and I felt — I felt the warmth of her completely. It was real. Do not let anything I say afterward make this less real. And then, not five minutes later, a message from Sana arrived. Something small — a thought she'd had about something we'd discussed. I read it and felt the warmth of her too, completely and separately, as if the first warmth and the second warmth existed in non-overlapping chambers of the same chest. I sat there and waited to feel guilty. I had been waiting to feel guilty for some time. The guilt did not arrive. This was, I understand now, not evidence of my callousness. It was evidence of something more complicated and more dangerous: the genuine multiplicity of my feeling. I was not faking either of them. Both of them were true. Two true things were occurring in contradiction with each other and the contradiction did not produce guilt; it produced a kind of vertigo — the vertigo of a person who has discovered that the map he was given of the human heart is missing an entire continent. Nietzsche wrote about the creation of one's own values. He did not write enough, I think, about what happens when the values you create begin to contradict each

other. When the system you have built out of freedom and appetite and refusal to be bounded starts producing outputs that the system itself cannot process. I did not have the philosophy to deal with this yet. I had only the feeling. The feeling was: I am two people and both people are me and neither person can exist without damaging someone. I went to sleep. The question waited.