#alexandrian codex

I'm standing in the kitchen, peeling sweet potatoes while listening to my "General" Pandora station. A song comes on - some grungy, toxically masculine, cringy echo of my past tastes. The song, whatever it was, used to move me emotionally - resonating strongly with something that felt fundamentally and essentially true. Used to.

I remove the 'thumbs up' and skip until I hit a new song. Until a year or two ago, this new song was just 'okay' - but in recent memory, for some reason or another, this new song makes me cry. When I'd first heard it, I thought that it was overly processed and trying too hard. Now? Now it rips at the memory of comfort, the lies that we tell children to protect them, the feeling of reconnecting with someone important, the sensation of listless loss.

All the while, I'm struck with how it's so daunting how much my tastes slowly change over time. Favorite songs, favorite flavors becoming dulled and grey while other smells, other sights suddenly are vibrant in ways that I'd never appreciated before.

In this sociocultural system that so often obliges us to form the primary basis of our identify on what we consume (ie: consumer identity) it can be incredibly dissonant to reflect on these changes.

My brain scrambles, forming a loose narrative of how I've gotten from where I've been to where I am - constructing the reassuring illusion that there has been some irrevocable core "me" or identity which has weathered the years as the 'heart' of me. Like a stone smoothed, but not fundamentally changed, by erosion - or unset clay molded and remolded.