Excerpts from a Memoir I'll Never Write, Part 5

To my little farm people

You're kind of everything to me, you know that right? 

I got into college recently. I always joke that I have the next ten years of my life planned out to the hour, but the truth is I know nothing of what my life is going to look like. And knowing that, holding these acceptance letters in my hand, reminds me how little time I have to figure it out, how close the horizon truly is. 

In my dreams, my plan was to go to some fancy schmancy out of state school and become shiny and effervescent and all the words that they use to describe people with infallible goodness (the how was always irrelevant -- the best kind of work is the kind that gets done magically, isn't it?). Get a job, get rich, find a husband who will sit there and debate the Byzantine Empire's fall with me while still never making me feel inferior, who will be the perfect amount of jealous and knows how to make oatmeal like my father (because everyone knows I burn orange juice, and need to marry someone who can cook). Have a few kids while making miraculous career strides and find a way to settle down without settling. Write a memoir. 

I start that life pretty soon, don't I? Yet, I'm no shinier than I was yesterday (which is not very shiny at all), and romance still scares/disgusts me as much as it always has. A friend has shown me too many pregnancy TikToks for me to want children anymore, and the closest I'll get to writing a memoir are these words I'm typing now, in my bedroom that's still lavender from the month of extreme boredom during the pandemic. I can't decide which school to attend because I'm as indecisive as I've always been, and worse -- none of the schools I was praying to get into three months ago excite me today. In fact, I opened an acceptance letter -- to a school I had considered to be one of my top choices -- and felt happy for exactly fifteen seconds. And by the sixteenth, paranoia, anger, resentment, sorrow, and worst of all...indifference had already begun to creep in. 

I suppose I'm trying to say I don't do well with change -- I don't think any of us do, frankly, which is why most of us remain stagnant for so long. I can write aphorisms about how I "don't want to peak in high school", but the truth is nothing will break me quite like leaving this behind will. My favorite author, Fredrik Backman (I can hear someone I know laughing right now -- hush), wrote something that I quoted in my first ever blogpost (wild): 

"Maybe all people have that feeling deep down, that your hometown is something you can never really escape, but can never really go home to, either. Because it’s not home anymore. We’re not trying to make peace with it. Not with the streets and bricks of it. Just with the person we were back then. And maybe forgive ourselves for everything we thought we would become and didn’t." 

If nothing I ever dreamed of comes true -- and I remain desperately mediocre my entire sorry life, and I promise to keep in touch but don't, and I spend the rest of my days running away from the fires I create but can't explain, forgive me. If the words I've wanted to say for decades never quite come out, pretend you've heard them. If I do the leaving but pretend you left me, go along with it, because the one thing I've never been able to figure out is how people move past all the people they never quite became, never quite knew, never quite saved. A girl I know calls it a God Complex, but maybe it's just the fact that the world is reaching 8-billion people large, and the only person we could ever hope to beat is ourselves. 

In ten years, I'll show up to your wedding (you better invite me), and I'll get drunk on the sidewalk outside because I'll feel some complicated emotion I won't be able to place until later -- something along the lines of how I had always made the conscious choice to put ambition over everything, without realizing that "everything" and "ambition" aren't mutually exclusive at all. I'll call my mother and cry about it, and she'll lecture me about her childhood friends who would fist fight with fire for her despite not knowing where she lives now. I'll remember the plans we made at 17 to retire to a Lake District together, raising chickens and grandchildren. That won't assuage me. Because I'm not doubting how strong our friendship is, or asking whether we'll be friends at 70.

I'm asking who it'll hurt more if we're not.