timelines

on the places I dream about

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I think of starting over a lot. I turn it over in my mind, like a marble being rotated round and round between the pad of my fingers. Or maybe the idea is more like pottery. I have reshaped it over and over again until I don’t really know what I’d imagined in the first place. I’ve even written about other lives I might have lived. But the thought is a bit like a drunk ex-boyfriend showing up at your door. You let them in, send them to the sofa, and pay them no mind. You hope by the morning they’ll have politely excused themselves out. It doesn’t always work out that way.

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When we were in the Cotswolds, we passed by so many local stores. I sifted through the products that lined the shelf. The locally brewed IPAs and ciders, the novelty coffee brands and fresh honey made by the wild bees in the field next door. I scan for paintings by local artists and one of a kind pottery. I wonder when I’ll open a place of my own, a coffee shop that sells local products and serves a small menu of seasonal dishes. Sometimes it’s a hole-in-the-wall place, a coffee exclusive option. I imagine carrying the baby in front of me as I serve customers. Sometimes, when I stare into big empty storefronts, I imagine it to be a combination of things — a coffee shop with a store section that sells products by local artists who can’t afford their own place. At the back would be a micro-bookshop. On a Friday, we’d shuffle around the tables and chairs and it becomes an event space for slam poetry or where authors come to read snippets of their debut book. I think about the community it would be.

I consider what I would serve — buttery pastries and thick bagels stuffed with smoked trout and capers or seeded brioche rolls with pesto chicken and sundried tomatoes. Loaves of fresh sourdough lining the shelf. Maybe there’d be a take-away window for those who want to grab and go.

The idea seems to grow a bit grander each time, but the further away from my twenties I get, the more risk averse I become. I’ve never been one to be spontaneous or jump in so fully committed to an idea. I’ve always been pragmatic and some days I think it’s my worst quality, something I can’t set down and walk away from.

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It’s a rather romantic idea to consider that maybe in another universe, another timeline, I would have pursued this pleasure of something bigger. That maybe I not only opened a coffee shop, but in some other lifetime, I pursued my degree in psychology or I actually made the move to Australia or I committed to the first hobby that brought me joy and became a travel photographer.

Maybe, maybe, may be.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what might have been. In another city, in another apartment. But finding a place that is mine. I wonder if in that life, I’d want something different too; if I ever stop chasing the other thing. I wonder if it’s healthy to think about these things as much as I do, to ponder about what I don’t have. It’s not a craving or a yearning, but it’s in that same space. It’s softer and more gentle than that. Like a little sore spot tucked under my ribs that I forget I have until I one day prod it with my finger.

I think my whole life I’ve been afraid to take risks. I turned away from things that I couldn’t control and now I’m too afraid to take any big leaps and bounds. Consequences, to me, are not to be played with. I wonder if it’s too late to change and then I think of how the reality of life is that it’s expensive and I can’t abandon the responsibilities for coffee shop dreams.

It’s like I’m itching for change; like in the summer when you’re so hot and bothered, you want to peel your clothes off and lay on the cold floor, it’s that feeling of bothered discontent. Like I’m looking out the window and everything is grey and I’m not unhappy, but I’m sitting in the space between happiness and some form of botheredness and there are these little panting whispers of, is this it?

I remind myself to be grateful. That life is always going to be greener on the other side. In this lifetime, at least for now, as I sit on my sofa with the cat pressed against my side, his eyes tightly closed and his purr a soft little engine humming, I don’t choose those other timelines.

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