Alexandra Edwards
Camilleri
English 170
22 September 2023
Channel Surfing
It’s eight forty-seven on a Friday night and your favorite show is about to start. You’re in the living room, relaxing on the couch, with a bowl of popcorn resting on your lap. It’s silent except for the noise of the television and the neighborhood kids that are always outside. The current channel is playing a re-run from last week. It’s now eight fifty and you’re starting to get bored of the past episode. You grab your remote and start channel surfing. The next channel is showing a documentary about penguins, and you think about how much your mom loves penguins and how much you don’t. You click to the next channel and now you’re watching a sitcom your friend begged you to start watching a few months ago, but you never did. You watch the show before realizing why exactly you never started it and click to the next channel. It’s not a documentary and it’s not a sitcom—it’s you, sitting on your couch with a bored expression on your face. You think that it’s weird for a second and that it’s probably just a similar looking person but no—it’s definitely you. You with the haircut you got last week that made you cry in your car for an hour because you hated it; you with your middle-school t-shirt on from ten years ago that still fits despite it being a size extra-small; you with the necklace from your grandmother around your neck that says ‘Be you. Everyone else is taken.’ You get up from the couch and the person on the screen gets up as well. You wave and it waves back. You pick your remote off from the floor and hastily try to change channels. It works and suddenly you’re no longer on TV. Now, the screen is showing your friend Nicole at a club with a drink in her hand. She’s talking to a guy, and you realize it’s your friend James. They look like they’re having a lot of fun. You click to the next channel and suddenly your sister is on the screen, halfway across the world in Paris. She’s sitting at a café, sipping from a teacup with her pinky straight out. You creep closer to the screen and see the silhouette of the Eiffel Tower and the blue sky expanding out behind her. You smile, thinking about how amazing it would be to be there next to her, talking about croissants and baguettes and how this is so much better than your hometown. But the moment is gone within an instant and you realize you’re still there, still in the hometown that you swear to hate but will never leave. You click to the next channel and your best friend Maya appears, sitting in a chair getting her makeup done by three different people while another person hands her a coffee. A satin green dress hangs behind her, cascading down to the floor. You remember she’s nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards and is the only female director nominated in the entire category. Just two years ago, you were in her parent’s basement talking about your future and she told you she was going to be “the best female director the world had ever seen.” You believed her.
The television goes black. It’s silent. You smack the remote against your hand but to no avail, the television remains off. After a few seconds of waiting for it to turn itself back on, you throw your hands up in defeat and fall back onto the couch. You think about your friends Nicole and James and how they were having so much fun, while you’re at home waiting to watch a show. You also think about your sister in Paris who is happier than she ever was here, while you’re stuck at home. You also wish you did something with your life, like Maya, but you’re still here. Everybody moved on, but you’re still here re-living the same day over and over again because college wasn’t for you and now you work at the local grocery store. You think that if your friends had their own TV shows about their life, people would tune in just like you were about to ten minutes ago, popcorn in hand and plans canceled, while yours would be put on for background noise. Why would anyone want to watch a twenty-year-old sit at home in their middle-school t-shirt waiting for a show to start? What’s interesting about that? You begin to ask yourself: Is my life even interesting enough to keep people tuned in? Is it enough to keep them entertained? Am I enough? The answer to this is short and simple: Yes. You are enough, you will always be enough, you were always enough. Someone just like you is out there searching the channels, wanting to watch someone else do exactly what they’re doing to know that they aren’t alone—that it’s okay.
The TV lights up and a little girl looks back at you. She has pigtails and is wearing a shirt that says, “BEE YOU!”. You inch closer to the screen until you are closer than you have ever been before. As you kneel, you see that she’s alone in her bedroom, crying with her knees bent up to her chest. You start to cry too. You cry because the little girl on the screen has her whole life ahead of her and you let her down. She has dreams and aspirations that will never come true because you were too scared. And you know what? That’s okay. The screen goes black and your reflection stares right back at you. Not your younger self—but you, the person that had their whole life ahead of them and did nothing with it. You, the person that still has their whole life ahead of them and can still do something with it. You and only ever you.