Impressionable

At a recent faculty reception, a woman asked, in lieu of an introduction, what city would I choose if I could live anywhere in the world. I said Berlin, and that’s where the trouble started.

“Why Berlin?” the woman inquired. Her name tag read ’Edith,’ and under her job title, “Dean.” She inflected Berlin with the kind of skepticism that would have been warranted had I just claimed Applebee’s was gourmet or daisy dukes were acceptable funeral attire.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, because . . .” I trailed off, realizing I had nothing intelligent to say about Berlin.

These university meet-and-greets tend to have a performative aspect, and I don’t do well under pressure. Impressing the dean of my department could do a lot for someone like me, a part-time instructor and graduate student aspiring to a tenure-track position. I figured that I could just say Berlin and someone else would say Tokyo and we’d move on. But Edith was intent on this Berlin business and determined to get to the bottom of it. I cleared my throat hoping it might dislodge an answer, but it just made me choke a little. I sipped at the cucumber-infused water that accompanies every university event, Edith eyeing me all the while, waiting.

This kind of thing has been happening a lot lately. I express an opinion that sounds like my own, only to find it belongs to someone else. I haven’t the slightest idea why I’d choose Berlin over Budapest or Oslo or the nomadic yurts of Mongolia. After some cognitive digging, I realized that the reason Berlin came to mind was because Gabe proposed it over dinner a few weeks ago, and I was particularly enamored with him at the time, and if he wanted Berlin, then Berlin it was. 

Because that’s what my boyfriend likes seemed like such a sappy answer that I feared Edith might abandon all hope for me as an academic. I glanced down at my own name tag in the hopes of finding some word to associate with a response, only to find they’d misspelled my name. Then to realize the handwriting was my own: “Hello, my name is Derk.”

“Well,” I said, fully aware of my fraud and determined to see it through, “because Berlin is an affordable place to live.” I was proud of my answer. Affordability felt like just the sort of thing a Derk would care about. Maybe he’s not the most imaginative fellow, but at least he’s pragmatic.

Edith looked appalled.

“You think Berlin is affordable?”

There was that inflection again, as if my answers diagnosed some grave pathology. I had no idea if I thought Berlin was affordable. I’d only been there once, right after college, on a shoestring romp across Europe. For me it was affordable. Some artsy guy, a painter I think, put me up for free. I’d met him on a couch-surfing app. He baked scones and introduced me to his ping pong league. I never asked what he paid for rent. It wasn’t that kind of relationship.

Edith said she had lived in Cologne for a year during her PhD program. It was nice enough, but she couldn’t stand the Germans’ devotion to rules and order.

“They wash their walls in the middle of the day,” she said. “Can you imagine?”

I pictured a stout, stern-faced man taking a sponge to a three-story house, the Bavarian kind with a pointed roof and exposed timber, a bucket of soapy water sloshing at his feet.

But that was silly. They probably used a hose.

“I could also see myself in France,” I added quickly, anxious to salvage my conversation with the dean. “Just not Paris.”

“Oh, but Paris is lovely,” she said. “Really, what do you have against Paris?”

“Paris…” I stammered.

It became a distant concept, Paris. I had done it again. There was really nothing I had against Paris other than what I’d heard from other millennial writers who inherited Paris as a place already discovered. Paris was so last century, its je ne sais quoi had been thoroughly said so that everyone knew its mysteries—which of course were just more accusations that didn’t belong to me and that I’d probably filched from sources of ostensible authority. If I had learned my lesson about Berlin, I was ahead to shut up about Paris.

“Excuse me, I really must use the bathroom,” I lied, resigned to never face this woman again, even if it meant living the remainder of my days as manager of a bingo hall or taste tester for puppy chow. Those seemed like fitting penalties for impersonating someone else’s opinions.

The longer I’ve lived with Gabe, going now on four years, the more I’ve noticed his habits blending with mine. Like how he puts his shoes on a rack instead of scattered around the floor, or his dirty clothes in a hamper instead of scattered around the floor. These habits, I’ve gladly assimilated. Then there are more subtle and rather silly ones. Like how he can’t sleep with the closet doors open and now I can’t either. I’ve inherited his weaknesses as well as his strengths. Or even the strange things, like how he says, “Fuck me up with some fried chicken,” when he really wants fried chicken, and suddenly I’m going around commanding people to fuck me up with various objects of my desire. What’s that even about?

“Gabe, we have a problem,” I told him after my meet-and-greet fiasco. 

“A problem?” Gabe said, raising a curious eyebrow but not looking seriously concerned.

He expects these sorts of things from me, problems. I think he’s begun to find them amusing.

“Yes,” I said. “I notice myself doing the things you do, saying the things you say, even the weird stuff.”

We sat in the living room. Under the coffee table, peering up at me like an old friend, was one of my dirty socks.

“I don’t say weird stuff,” Gabe said.

“Everyone says weird stuff,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like how you say, ‘Damn, Gina’ to people who aren’t Gina.”

“I don’t say that.”

“Well somebody does, and now I’ve been saying it.”

“If I started saying it,” Gabe said, “would that make you feel better?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, “but maybe.”

Gabe had a point right. I hadn’t been impersonating just his traits, but the traits of friends and colleagues, celebrities, perhaps even complete strangers, all without my say-so. What happened to my independence, my uniqueness? I’ve been called, in unsavory circumstances, a snowflake, but I secretly liked the metaphor. It meant that I was special. Now that my poor snowflake was melting into all the others, how was I to appear different from the snowflake who got peed on or who fell into a trash can? My sensitive, snowflake heart couldn’t bear it.

I recalled something Gabe told me recently: “You bring chaos into this apartment.”

There was that Germanic devotion to order that Edith would have found so appalling. No wonder he saw himself at home in Berlin. Perhaps there was no need to make the journey. Here I was staring down the dirty sock, compelled to put it in the hamper. I resisted but found resistance strangely difficult. I wanted to pick up the sock not because Gabe would definitely make me once he noticed, but because I wanted to. Where had my chaos gone? Was it only a matter of time before I succumbed to Gabe’s brainwashing and I, too, felt a rush at the sight of a freshly wiped counter?

Another way to consider these assimilations, a gentler way, is as a subtle osmosis—an imperceptible flow of idiosyncrasies from one person to the next. Someone in Manhattan starts wearing jeans with the top button undone and suddenly everyone’s doing it, enough to call it a trend. Others hear about it on an episode of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and make a personal vow to never under any circumstances be the kind of person who skimps on pant buttons.

These differing responses—to button or not to button—prove there’s a degree of agency in the matter, but I’m not convinced it’s enough. How much of my identity is really a result of my own thinking and not regurgitated information from a magazine or some eight-year-old TikTok star? What of myself is me and only me?

Yes, I’ve heard how we are composed of billions of individual cells and somehow, miraculously, these composite parts make up a unified whole. All I can say is thank goodness. Otherwise, it would be more exhausting than it already is to decide what to watch on Netflix.

People change, this much I know. The changes in my life have certainly aired on the positive. There was a time, it must have been middle school, when I enjoyed Nickelback. I considered that band the pinnacle of fine music. Now I look back on my middle school self with condescending pity, relieved that I came to my senses, grateful for the human capacity to grow and be pruned like a shrub. There are those who claim to be immune to change, but then there are also those who still like Nickelback, and I trust neither. The difference is that before moving in with Gabe, I felt that I had autonomy over these changes.

As a gay man, I’ve had to think a lot about my identity and the preferences that shape it: scrutinized and doubted and hidden them. I attended a rural high school, where boys spent their weekends shooting squirrels and wore cowboy boots decidedly for function, not fashion. I liked writing poetry about sunsets and had an affinity for pastel-colored polos. My preferences appeared, in relation to theirs, extraterrestrial, so foreign and isolated that if I intended to express them, I might as well drive to school in the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, rainbow flags flying. Freshman year, as my budding sexuality insisted that Axe body spray and cargo shorts should go the way of the dodo, I made a pact with myself to mute that inner voice and prefer what boys were expected to prefer, to act as boys were expected to act.

This meant that my efforts not to appear gay were also choices, very deliberate ones, a border I traced and maneuvered each day. I ensured my wrists remained taught, my voice sounded masculine—careful to avoid that sibilant s which had betrayed the other boys like me, just two of them who were “out” in my school of four hundred and who consequently faced the cruelty of the popular kids whose epithets were as grotesque as their fashion sense.

On weekends, I feigned interest in riding along in friends’ trucks as they careened through muddy fields, in drinking Coors Light, in ogling Emma Watson’s leaked nudes. Well, liking Emma Watson was not an outright deception. She seemed trustworthy. I could admit to her how, of all the characters in the Harry Potter franchise, I had the biggest crush on the timid and clumsy Ron Weasley, and she’d totally get it.

Through all of this, I maintained a keen awareness that the person I presented to the world was not the same person within. I didn’t like loud trucks or beer or boobs. I knew that. I might have been lying to the others, but not to myself. Instead, I shaped a second self, like a sculptor with clay, from the negative space of my actual self, giving the impression that I really was the person my ranching, coal mining town expected to see. It gave me no small degree of satisfaction that I could pull the whole thing off. 

Much harder and more intimidating was facing the truth, to admit what I didlike, or, in this case, who I liked. The prospect of revealing the charade terrified me. Yet the charade also gave me a sense of power. I had learned the ways of the heterosexuals and gained their trust. Not only had I Trojan-horsed my way through the city walls but had come to live peacefully there, my guise undetected. It seemed at the time like a victory.

I wonder how many people, gay or otherwise, develop a fondness for the illusion and find it easier to maintain than facing the fallout of honesty. To come out at last and voice that decisive preference—I love men!—took years of personal turmoil and soul-searching and late nights spent seeking help from gay chat rooms, which turned out to be terrible sources of information. When I finally screamed from the rooftops, I love men! I knew it was the truth, my truth, and I hadn’t been swayed by anything other than my own volition.

I came out in college, in a city a thousand miles from my hometown. Far enough away to begin anew, I sculpted, with terror and delight, life as it felt true to me. I performed in Rocky Horror, where I wore eyeliner and a black lace corset. I made a playlist devoted entirely to Beyoncé. Brunch took on tremendous significance.

I met Gabe for the first time at a dessert place, where we split a cake in the shape, so we were told by the cashier, of Venus’ nipple. Gabe had grown up in this progressive haven, and described how, in high school, being gay was seen as a status symbol. My jaw must have actually dropped because he reached out a hand and touched my face—gently, as if to say, it’s alright, you’re here now. But it was only to wipe away a bit of chocolate nipple that had smudged the corner of my lips.

Moving to a new town revealed how places can shape me as much as the people in them. Oh, who I could have been if I’d grown up somewhere else! Imagine me in Paris—fashionable, handsomely sullen, adept at rolling cigarettes. But then I’d have a whole other mess of problems, and there’s no telling how bad they’d be. No, better to go on living the life I’ve been given, where each day offers its own discoveries.

One sunny afternoon, I found a rainbow-colored sarong made of soft rayon in a store near campus that smelled of patchouli and incense. It felt like unearthing a talisman and quickly came to represent my interior blooming. I wore the sarong everywhere, in ways it was probably never meant to be worn: as a scarf, as a belt, as a cape. I’d never been the kind of child who carried around a blanket, but now I was the kind of half-child, half-adult who insisted on bringing the sarong to class, to parties, to graduation, even after it had torn in one spot and got charred by a campfire in another and developed, much to Gabe’s chagrin, a certain musk.

Nowadays, the sarong spends most days in the closet. The irony isn’t lost on me. It’s not that I’ve outgrown the sarong so much as found other, subtler ways to portray on the outside who I am on the inside.

Those borders I traced so diligently have crumbled and become permeable as I look at people less with apprehension and more with curiosity. Maybe this is why I’ve become so impressionable. With Gabe, it feels nice. We’re building a life together, the kind of life I didn’t think possible for people like us, and it really does feel like a singular entity—our life—so it makes sense that I’ll borrow his thoughts and opinions from time to time, in the same way I borrow his clothes.

“When’s the last time you washed this thing?” Gabe asked one morning while trying to identify the source of an odor. He pinched between thumb and forefinger the rainbow sarong, which looked in the frank light of day rather like the shipwrecked headscarf of a flamboyant pirate.

Washed it? The idea seemed absurd, as absurd as Gabe finds my habits from time to time, as absurd as he found me now.

“It’s going in the laundry,” he insisted when I couldn’t give him an answer.

“Absolutely not,” I insisted back.

Did he not realize that I would move to Berlin for him? Maybe there, I’d be forced into cleanliness, but until then I had rights.

We stared at each other, unblinking. I sensed our wills duking it out like that final battle scene in Harry Potter where the spells of good and evil collide, one blue, one red. Our skirmish was proof that parts of myself remain uniquely, inexplicably mine. I felt determined to keep it that way.

The reason I flung myself on this particular hill would become clear only later, like a creek that’s been stepped in and takes time to settle again into transparency. I wanted to preserve the sarong, and I feared that a wash would remove what makes it special. Soap and water would barge in like a loud personality, scrubbing clean all those glorious years during which I became who I am, diluting the sarong to just another thing.

But in the moment, I couldn’t explain. I stared with a face that I hoped communicated the significance of my defiance, or at least was severe enough to suggest that my losing would come with so much despair and pouting that, for Gabe, it wouldn’t really be a victory.

With a sigh, he acquiesced.

“I don’t understand you sometimes,” he said, returning the sarong to the closet.

Good,” I said. “That makes two of us.”