The All Too Familiar

Once again, I open my eyes to the all too familiar. The same ceiling, the same blue walls, the same rundown floor I’ve known my whole life.

The sun is edging out from the color-matched blue blinds of my window. I don’t know the time, I’d guess close to noon, but during the summer, the sun seems to be having a competition with itself on how early and how bright it can be so who knows how much I’ve missed. I should get up, make sure my housemates believe I’m okay because at least I’ve gotten out of bed to open my door, but surely their expectations and assumptions can wait a few more minutes.

How do people get up every day? I can see the world has spun again, there are jobs to do and errands to run and activities to keep oneself busy. And yet, I spend every day in the same room, muddling through a meaningless list of to-do’s I’ve manufactured until it’s time to travel the six inches from my desk to my bed to sleep and start all over again. Why get up when there isn’t really a life to get up to.

As a child, when I thought of my future, I never thought it would look exactly the same as my then-present. I’ve lived in my childhood bedroom, in the same house, with the same housemates (okay, they’re my parents), since I was two years old. High school, college, job after job, nothing has gotten me out of this house. Now nearing the dreaded thirty, I’m just existing rather than living.

I’m not trapped on a space ship flying to a new, habitable planet. I’m not underground and locked away after an inevitable nuclear war or volcanic eruption or totalitarian, psychopathic reign of terror. I’m not imprisoned for some crime I may or may not have committed. By all accounts, every aspect of my life reeks of privilege.

And yet, I am my own warden. I am my own gate keeper. I am the untied dog sitting outside of the store waiting for their owner; freedom in front of it but instead it chooses to stay sitting. Like a good girl. No one would say it is suffering, but I think everyone would agree pastures are preferable to leashes.

The heart shaped locket my mother gave me rests on my chest. I am loved (or at least thought of enough to be given a non-perishable gift.) I suppose lockets are given as reminders of home, that wherever you adventure and travel, your home goes with you. But what if you never leave? At what point does a reminder become a burden?

When my parents were younger, they imagined a future I think most of them got. House, family, career—it may not look how they thought it would, or how their parents hoped it would for them, but for the most part past generations were able to somewhat thrive. Not like my generation. For all our possible prosperity, like me, most of my friends are just trying to survive.

Physically, financially, mentally survive. The future looks anything but bright, anything but free and promising. I can’t imagine how it looks to anyone younger. A dying planet, polarized and divided nations, less and less costs more and more, too many have too little and too few have too much.

I think the dream life parents picture for their children is a life better than they had. But, I assume everyone my age would agree, in many ways our parents had it better than we have it now. They had choices and options and opportunity. Most, not all, but most had what we think real freedom is.

I wonder—is it really freedom if you can picture it? I’ve spent so many hours and days imagining a freer self, someone out there discovering what others have long already known or maybe finding something brand new. That’s freedom, I tell myself. No matter how old something is, everything is new to someone. So much of the world can be new to me.

But real freedom, real utopia, is unimaginable. A better life can be thought of, but it’s subjective and never quite as shiny and joyful as planned. For as much time as I have spent visualizing a life, any kind of life, outside of this blue room, it feels like a waste of time. Nothing I’ve imagined has ever come true.

In the span of a life there are only a few days any person can really remember fully. At the time we don’t have a say in which days those are, but we grab ahold of moments we hope we can carry with us into other moments. So many days are forgotten. So many days are wasted. Today, I think I’ll let today be forgotten. Today can be a day I don’t remember.

The locket falls to one side as I roll away from the window. Tomorrow. I will live tomorrow. I will have the future I planned, the future I imagined, tomorrow. I will do more than just exist. I will get up and get out and live just like everyone else does. Today I will rest. Yes, yes I’ll need to rest if tomorrow is filled with adventure. This is an excellent plan. Tomorrow.

Once again, I close my eyes to the all too familiar.