"Just think of the future," they patted my head. Slammed stacks of textbooks on my desk. Assessed my worth through bell curves and scarlet letters.
But I beg the question: what the fuck is the future?
I am twenty, bored with life and excited for death.
I have spent my entire life believing I was working towards a venerable future but when faced with the word on a lazy Sunday afternoon with peers chattering about plans and career and marriage, I struggled to grasp it. My mind blacked out and, where I used to be able to see an older May, confident and content, garbed in a pantsuit and smelling like fresh brew, a career woman sans woes, I saw nothing. There was an emptiness in my timeline past present, life vacating.
Sometimes, when I feel optimistic, I dabble with the idea of planning. I dare myself to dream of travelling. When I do, it is often alongside dimpled chin and bright eyes, and he'd say, "Let's go after we graduate. Let's travel together."
There would always be a conviction in his voice that knew no lies, hammering down words with iron-wrought bolts on the styrofoam board of my meager hope. I break, of course. He was promising to be in a future I have never thought would come to pass, so secure in it that he let no possibility of failure hinder him. I was flailing blindly in the dark, half-heartedly grasping for understanding.
Two people, barely two years apart, stood so differently under the gaze of this terrifying obscurity. I cowered. He braved. I think this scares me.
I hated the systematic way I was taught in school -- tests and deadlines, homework and exams -- and though my mind saw a life my parents planted into my head, I at least believed in something. There was a cause to fight for no matter how false on hindsight, and where there is a fight, there is blood, sweat and tears, and reason to live.
I fear I have lost this piece of the puzzle when I started questioning. I suppose blame would be the easiest placed on scepticism and a desire to want more out of life: what does "future" really mean in my life if I want to be happy and content as I have always been told to believe?
If I were to be honest with myself, though, I suppose blame would be the most accurately placed on my wayward cowardice. I breed a creature of stagnance within my bones and when the rays of a bright, startling life achievable only through honest hard work, persistence and pain rise, I shut down. I release all the values I have been taught to uphold and gather between my arms the comfort of the present day, the doubt of the flickering future smothered beneath my feet.
Perhaps I am afraid to live, afraid to believe in the possibility of a future paved by years of foiled plans and uncertainties.
I confide in older friends who tell me their lives fell into place every day they continued living, "Don't worry about it, May. I never planned my life to turn out this way and see, I'm still here."
To which I would think, full of exasperation, fear and confusion, "How do you live something you don't understand?"
MAY X
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