Shapeshifters

When I look around me, my eyes absorb what I see and I decide who I need to be accordingly. Rectangular rooms, a cat and people who look a little like me turn me into one kind of person. White desks, new faces, Apple computers and coffee mugs everywhere turn me into an awfully quiet version of myself. And stone pillars, wooden benches and friendly faces make me the happiest version of myself. But the list goes on.

I have never questioned why one needs to be so many different people.

That’s just how it is.

The switches are quiet and smooth. They’re easy. They’re the purest version of shape shifting I have seen in the real world. In dreams, people change form all the time. My mom turns into my best friend and my cat is suddenly the guy I crush on in college. And all this shape shifting goes unquestioned until I wake up and go what the heck. But it all makes sense, really. Because a dream is a reflection of reality, minus the complexities. A dream is a blatant, straightened out version of reality.

We’re all so many different people, not just inside our heads, but also to the outside world. If my best friend watched me at work, she’d be shocked at what she saw. Similarly, if the people at my workplace saw me at home, they’d think I was someone else.

Am I lying to any of them? Of course I’m not. I am all the people I pretend to be.

Now that I have started to give this odd phenomenon some thought, it has really started to intrigue me. I get odd thrills when I mix up two of my worlds. Intersect two planes of my existence. Once, amidst all the open tabs on the latest fashion news on my work computer, I googled “hegemony pdf” and started to read a sociology paper.

Sitting in an air-conditioned room, surrounded by racks of clothes and fashionable people talking about fashionable things, secretly reading a sociological paper felt exhilarating. 

Isn’t it amazing how we live so many lives and can be so many people in one single body? It overwhelms me every time I think about it.

I wonder if I will ever get used to the fact that different worlds exist. And most of the time, my next planet is only a rickshaw ride away.