all the stuff I thought I'd have by now
or how I continually seem to subvert the pervasive idea of 'normal'
the oh
Oh, it’s so hard not to grieve it all, isn’t it? We thought we’d have more money and sense by now. We thought we’d know what to do about love, friends, home and family and that certain terrors would stop coming for us in the night. By now, I expected to own a home that I love. I might have filled it with pretty things. important things.
Today, my life looks nowhere near anything I imagined, but now I wonder if I ever imagined anything. I never actively craved
a wedding,
a brood of children,
a house in the city or the country. I didn’t know what I wanted my partner to be like. The way I saw it, there was plenty of time, plenty of choice. I just assumed it would all fall together. Perhaps that’s the point. Maybe I neglected the basics, being too busy with survival or trying to forge a career & staying afloat. inspired. alive
and/or
perhaps I never really wanted the things we’re told to want.
Like really, with my whole heart.
/////////
the um
Last year I left an apartment in Brooklyn that I liked but never got around to Fully Living in. I stayed there for two years; half of that was the Pandemic lockdown, and the other half was recovering from the Pandemic lockdown, which has taken me up until now. I bought paintings that were never hung. I embraced my neighbourhood as far as the trees, flowers, birds and the sky, but nothing and no one besides. I felt shell-shocked, detached, hypersensitive, smaller than myself. When the world started to open up again, it felt loud, dirty and unsafe. With the clarity that can only come from hindsight, I’d say the apartment was more hiding place than home. By 2022, I was in full retreat mode. I put my furniture and books in a storage unit in North Carolina. Gonna move out there, I told my friends, who thought it was random, but nodded a lot and said very little. New York was too fraying on the nervous system, I declared. I broke my lease and kept it moving, but up until now, I still haven’t reached North Carolina. No one was surprised by this.
//////
the oooh.
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