There will maybe come a time when you realise you’re 27, 37, 47, or 87, when yesterday you were just 17 and you won’t be able to tell how another decade passed away — how your life got divided into so many before and afters. And there’s this feeling that your youth has been altered somehow, maybe not quite there as it used to be. Nothing will really change, but everything will feel different.
Five years ago I was twenty-two year old in the midst of a global pandemic, a fresh graduate and wondering what I would do with my life. My plan then was to finish school, move out and live in a flat share with two other girls who would become my best friends. It was this fantasy adulthood that I had dreamed for myself, the stuff of movies. I wanted to carve myself a new identity, be the version of me that I desperately wanted to be: cool, young and free.
None of that has happened and I don’t really know if I’m okay with it. I wonder if in five years, will I regret the person that I’ve become. Will I always question whether I made the right decision. Probably. Maybe. I know on some days I feel like I have nothing to show of the last ten years.
In five years, I want to be living in a house with a big kitchen and patio doors that overlooks a garden that I’ve toiled away at. Spring bulbs planted, a used barbecue set lingering in the corner awaiting warmer days. I wonder if I’ll have the wall-to-wall bookcase, the oversized armchair by the window for me to curl up in.
I want to have continued traveling to a new city and a new country every year so I can tell my kids — tell myself — that I never stopped seeking adventure. I’d like to have lived in one more city, just one more. I wonder if I will still be as impatient as I am today, as I was yesterday and as I was five years ago. I want to be fluent in Spanish and be better at letting the little things go. I’d like to have taken a dance class at some point. Maybe salsa. And also a sketch class. I think drawing can be therapeutic if I let go of the perfectionist in me.
If I’m honest, I don’t care where my career goes because I’ve never been one to wrap my life around something so inanimate, but if you pressed me for it, I’ll admit that I’d like to work a job that I fall in love with. I’d like to find something that drives passion in me, something that makes me feel that I have purpose. I think of that scene in Friends where Chandler says, “Everybody hates their job,” and everyone around him protests that they in fact love what they do. I want that. I want fulfilling work, creative and challenging work.
Sometime in the next five years, I’d like to learn how to properly cook a steak. And also master the art of sourdough because I genuinely believe one of the true joys in life is a fresh, crusted loaf of bread.
In five years, will I have learned to stop pacing. To learn to let the washing pile up or save the laundry for another day because it’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t get completed immediately.
I wonder if in five years my life will revolve around not just me and B, but around another, a baby, small and precious. Will my heart feel full when that time comes?
I think, the true goal — if I had to choose, is to wake up and find contentment. And I wonder if that’s even possible. All I’d really like is to be able to call up a friend and talk, to throw a dinner party, to laugh more loudly and brazenly pour myself more wine. I’d like to continuously fall in love with my husband, to feel my heart swell because I created the life that I had always craved.
In five years, I’d like to think that I’ve matured enough to not let the smallest bumps in life throw me in disarray, but I also wonder if it’s become a trait of mine to like order and peace. Recognising that spontaneity is not designed for me.
The problem, really, is that there is too much to do. Too much to experience. Too many books to read, movies to watch, food to devour and people to greet. I guess that’s what makes it all so spectacular. Is that lame to say?
Five years definitely feels so far away yet so near at the same time. Cheers to life 🥂
Not lame at all. Here’s to the next five years 🥂