Where are we all going?
Thankfully we have all grown up and we know the rules, but it wasn’t always this way. Once we might’ve been naughtier. These days, we know that you’re not supposed to peek at the end of the book before you’ve started reading it or even when you reach halfway. That would spoil it all. Although you want to know what happens in the end, you simply have to wait and see.
I’m very guilty of this sort of impatience. Imagine if you heard a sudden ‘Pssst, c’mere, and I’ll tell you what your future looks like,’—would you be able to resist such an offer? Maybe you would, you might be built of sterner stuff. But equally you might wonder what this quack’s method might be; how he came to be so oracular? I’ll wager you’d be tempted, at the very least.
I now must make an aside to talk about myself, but being as it is that this fills me with more dread than pleasure, I shall be brief in my dealings.
The past year has been a blip in time for me.
My life inverts between indolence and entropy. (Don’t laugh at me; these are nice words and both correctly used.) I have had years like this before. That does not, however, change the essential quality of listlessness. The world continues on in its conveyance, with everyone bustling about and being successful—or having at least a good crack at it, whilst I am frozen in time like poor wronged Hermione in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale.
I have been twenty-one for a very long time; for all of eleven months. What I appreciate about this fact is that I am the age I ought to have been when graduating. Twenty-one is a very proper age to finish university—not twenty like I was: a botched rushed job, delivered in haste with pinching forceps and midwives biting their lips fretfully.
The year makes a lot of difference. The year answers for and amends some of the wrongs I filled the opening act of my twenty-first year with. A year alters so much, let alone two, which is why in Romeo & Juliet, Lord Capulet begs:
My child is yet a stranger in the world;
She hath not seen the change of fourteen years.
Let two more summers wither in their pride,
Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.
However I shall not stand around to exhume a fictional patriarch’s misjudgements.
But the year which passed officially without consequence is ending. And it’s a lie to say that nothing happened, only despite all the jerking movements which I made, the fits and starts, I ended up exactly in the position I was when I started. Although I suppose that if you start and end a circumnavigation of the globe from the same port, that in itself would not undo the circumnavigation. Never mind, my analogues are shoddy. The salient point is that this is how it has all felt to me; that this year I did things and they didn’t matter.
“You can drink, can’t you?” not one but two women asked me lately; friends of my parents. One then laughed in a bizarrely humourless way and added: “It’s a good thing, in the end, looking younger than your age. People are always in such a rush to grow up.” But I don’t think I look young for my age at all. They are mistaken. Rather, I think people are simply surprised how the age twenty-one overpowers me, exceeds me: how I haven’t done enough yet with myself to fill two whole decades and one wriggler. It is something I have made a note of, I feel like saying. I am doing my best to change this.
What will we all be doing in ten years?
This game is infinitely playable, and infinitely editable. You may, as you please, substitute in any period of time. One year; two years; two decades; a half-century. A month, even. As they say, a week’s a long time in politics. So be my guest.
Some people carry a pack of cards with them in their bag wherever they go, so that if they are ever left with time to kill and a group of people to entertain, they are furnished with the means of doing so. What I do is carry this game. What will we all be doing in ten years? Or, better: What will so-and-so be doing in ten years? Brilliant. The whole table is agog, if you get your timing right. Now we get to indulge in idle gossip, too.
You can be more specific in your inquiry, should you wish. Who will be the first person from college to have a baby? Get married? Mint their first million? Oh, it’s so idle, I know. But I love it, I love it.
My father has told me since time immemorial that there are three degrees of prestige to the art of conversation-making.
The first tier, and the lowest, refers to talking about THINGS.
The second tier, mid-brow, refers to talking about PEOPLE.
The final tier, the apex, the summit to which we ought all aspire, refers to talking about IDEAS.
Most people, he says disparagingly, percolate safely between the first two tiers. Only the rare and chosen few can reach the heady heights of IDEA-MONGERING.
Such gossip then must inhibit me from reaching my intellectual potential. Then let them do away with it. For I must glut myself on my gossip.
Sometimes, people will not take so well to my overtures, and will only wryly indulge me. (Gossip is at best a venality so I do understand.) They are not prophets. They throw their hands in the air. Who’s to say where we’ll be? What, in life, has ever been predictable?
And yet, even if I must shut up shop with my conversation and take my gossipings away with me like homework, to be completed alone, I will go on wondering.
There will be no prompt nor story-board which I cannot convert into something quite cinematic. Take the most pedestrian of university couples—you know the sort; irreproachable but for sheer dullness. I will imagine them lathering up their tiny plump toddlers at bathtime, releasing a shoal of rubber duckies into the soapy high-tide. I will imagine them, with the easiest sleight-of-hand (this is my bread and butter; it comes so naturally to me) even as premature grandparents, stolid and respectable in their good-quality clothes, the presiding consuls of their family, appearing venerably at marriages, Christenings, deaths and graduations.
Don’t try and faze me with any project slightly more postmodern; I shall rise to it. I can imagine a suitable future for any old bohemian, be them as they may. But, admittedly, my favourite fantasies are quite square and straight-laced. I love imagining people having their own families. I’m sorry. I fill my brain with rolls of film, shot grainily, shot with a shaky hand manoeuvring the camera. There is nothing else I’d prefer to watch.
I couldn’t do it for myself, though. No thank you. It’s not my place to imagine my own future. That is verboten.
And I reconciled this with myself the other day—whilst I am so hungrily curious to see what other people’s futures look like, I’m truly in no rush.
You see, when I was seventeen I was walking home from school, downhill. It was September. I composed a line of poetry and it repeated itself in my head like a noxious refrain. It was not a very good line of poetry, but it was entirely representative of how I felt, then. It was a mewling cry: ‘Please let autumn lie a little longer.’ That is my favourite thing about myself. I have always known when a period of my life was to be treasured. I’ve never had a rude awakening after the fact of—oh, what a marvellous time that was. I’ve always known.
Part of the fun of the future is the gambling. Poker chips clacking impatiently and roulette spinning. Monaco, but with the stakes upon our weddings, our babies, our finances.
If this dud year had never happened, I would never have experienced things like my usually reticent father confiding that what matters most to him in all the world is belonging.
Nor would I have experienced the moments when, whilst drying up the dishes, my mother looks intently at our incontinent, elderly cat and of all the things she could say to him at this point, she says: ‘You will never know how much I love you.’ To make and remake my point: the song ‘Smelly Cat’ from Friends could have been written about him. I’m sorry to have said it, but it’s true.
Countless other things. I never would have written my novel; a novel which will probably never come to anything but at least I did it. Nor would I have met the brilliant people I did through my last job, including the flame-haired ex-combatant who told me, no word of a lie, how she had “done her hip in” a long time ago on deployment—how? “Only went and got blown up, didn’t I?” Also about her grandmother’s tortoise, whose shell used to get painted with nail polish—which you must never do because tortoise shells are porous and this is toxic, only it very much suited this particularly flamboyant tortoise, who used to go strutting down the broadway and winking at cars.
I hope, more than anything, that in ten years we can have equal amounts of fun wondering about the shape of the next decade—and tremendous amusement looking back on where we were at twenty-one or however old you are, speculating.
i don't know how to explain it but this itched something within my brain. lovely writing!
As someone who has also had a rather nothing year - yet I've been twenty-two for half of it which comes with it's own set of dread as the post-university, life-starting age in my head - I do feel this a lot, but it has given me (if nothing else) an appreciation for some of the small things I've got to do this year if it weren't for my own malaise