The likelihood of me ever realizing a couple of dreams decreases incrementally with each passing year. Things like:
• Spending a decade on the Khaudom Game Reserve in Namibia becoming one with the elephants—the beautiful, beautiful elephants
• Having a number one on the college charts
• Pillaging through clubs night after night in coke-fueled, entourage-fabulous, rock star bliss (subheading: incriminating video on “Celebrities Uncensored”)
• Winning the Indy 500
• Master puppeteering for the Jim Henson Company
• Heading up the “New Yorker”
• Eloping with Eddie Vedder
• Discovering a cure for clinical depression
Is this aging? Is it, holy god, surrender? Possible, but unlikely. I’m still full enough of angst and outrage, neuroses and passions, that it feels more like pragmatic acceptance. Why boohoo about my lack of a New York loft when I never did like taking the subway? Why rue the absence of pachyderms in my professional life when I’ve got a dog, a cat and four finches who are as dear to me as my spouse? (Well, the cat and the dog are; the birds I could live without, little shitting machines.)
If a tattooed progressive takes on a mortgage and there’s no one around to point and laugh, does it make a sound? Is there a discernible difference between growing up and selling out? Does it matter, after 30 or so, if there is? If you learn to love and admire softer things, things on a much less ambitious scale; if your focus on the amazing becomes affection for the attainable, have you lost something precious and wild or gained something soothing and profound? I just don’t know.
I’m slowly coming to terms with this grief—and it is grief, even if the dreams are pure whimsy. But it’s a small grief, the sort that accompanies having a crooked nose, or being tone deaf, or having four fingers on each hand when all you ever wanted to do was devote your life to opening jar lids for orphans. Certain things in the universe are immutable, utterly impossible or thoroughly inevitable. Either way, it takes some getting used to, but as there’s no one to blame or write outraged letters to, the soul does, finally, acquiesce. Rage, raging against the dying of the light is invigorating and all, but after enough time you realize the quiet importance of your own temperament and paying the phone bill on time and the redemptive properties of a good night’s sleep.
If I crosscheck all I ever thought I would need, in my most high-blown of daydreams, against what I have here and now, most every item gets a resounding “yup.” Friends, interests, love and experiences—yes, yes, yes and yes. Full belly, shoes with sturdy soles, a handsome someone to throw a hump in me when my oxytocin level drops, all of the above. Family, check. Shelter, check. Mobility, check. Physical health, check. Sound mental health, well, let’s pencil that one in.
The issue now becomes wants. And those, We’ve got plenty of mojo left to manifest.
populargirls@tabletmag.com
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