D-o-a-M-S: Writing to reach you (continued); Eleven years ago
On a bridge, over a busy motorway, towards the end of a summer;
Younger: You again, huh?
Older: It's something to do. Remember last time we spoke?
Younger: More or less.
Older: Been a long, strange year since then, huh?
Younger: You know what? Screw you. All this "I can tell you but you won't remember" crap - this year's been awkward and unsettling and stressful. Like you couldn't give me any hints?
Older: Causality, remem--
Younger: Oh, I forgot the convenient excuse. You can't give me any information because it might w-r-e-c-k the u-n-i-v-e-r-s-e. Oh no. Meanwhile, I'm confused, and angry, and you can't even help?
Older: I can tell you it gets worse.
Younger: No, I think you misheard me. I said 'help'.
Older: It gets a lot worse, then it gets better. [Sigh] Look, you know how you've had a pretty good year, but you've done some incredibly stupid shit?
Younger: You could say that.
Older: I am saying that, because it happened. There are some things I liked about this year, but there's a hell of a lot I didn't. And it really does get worse - you/I/we end up graduating from stupid to just plain weird. But there's something that, if you could remember, I would need you to remember.
Younger: What's that?
Older: That none of the dumb-ass things you get up to in the next two years are permanent. Oh, sure, you lose friends and alienate people and even in my now there's probably one or two people who remember how much of an ass you were. But even though you offend some people mortally, you make it up to them - at least to the ones that really matter.
Younger: What about the rest?
Older: Oh, they drift away - some of them make your life hell for a little while in various ways and through various means, and there's a really dark time coming up, but... It's all just time you have to encounter. A series of dark moments, and then, suddenly, wham, things start to trend upward again.
Younger: It's not been such a bad year. I mean, there was XXXXXX... and XXXXX, and XXXX.
Older: Okay, well, sorry to disillusion you, but you don't see XXXXXX for another two and a half years, and when you do, it's kind of awkward. You were an asshat to XXXXX - I mean, seriously, you're lucky you didn't get stabbed in the chest for that one - and you only ever see her once again and even then she doesn't acknowledge you. Which is probably for the best.
Younger: But what about XXXX?
Older: I'm not telling you anything even if you're not going to remember. It's all great with her now, and that goes on for a little while, and that's all I'm going to say.
Younger: So why do you keep coming back if you can't change anything and I can't remember anything?
Older: Perhaps I just like talking to myself. Look, I'm serious when I say things get better, but then they plateau - first in three years for about three years, then seven years from now things start out amazingly then just become everyday. It's just the way things go. So I figured I'd come back and visit you now, before all the boredom. Besides, it's so much easier to remember the bad stuff from this year. There was a hell of a lot of good stuff too.
Younger: Yeah? Maybe only from your perspective. Look, you remember how I ended up in hospital in March? And then moved out of the family home? And then lost my summer job?
Older: It's a nadir, all right. It's a shitty end to a mixed-up year. The summer you have ahead of you is okay - you'll travel around a bit, catch up with people, that sort of thing. And next year at Uni starts out okay. It just gets a bit dark midway through. Look, I meant it when I said that none of the badness is permanent - nothing scars you so much that--
Younger: Wait, I remember something now. You're studying another degree and mooching off your parents, right?
Older: Yes.
Younger: So how can you say that none of this is 'permanent'? Sounds to me like you gave up trying to be ambitious and successful and just went for whatever sounded best.
Older: It's nice that you can be an asshat and not be wrong all at the same time. Besides, your definition of 'ambitious and successful' right now would be to be able to write like Hunter S. Thompson and maybe, just maybe, own a car and be able to drive it. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Younger: So what's your definition of 'successful' now?
Older: ... That's kind of difficult to explain.
Younger: Try.
Older: Well, there's the academic success. You get your degree from here - eventually - but by the time you get it your grade average is irrevocably damaged, so you have to settle for mid-table respectability. That chips away at you for a bit. So I took more courses, and always had the motivation to do better than I did back then, or now. But I can't do this without romanticising things a bit - you want to be a writer, a journalist, something like that?
Younger: That would be kind of cool. I like writing for the student newspaper...
Older: Well, you don't stop doing that. It peaks in a couple of years, then it starts to wind down. But you get kind of obsessed with both just passing this degree and working somewhere you'll find out about soon. And here's the thing. You don't let failures beat you down - you're too stubborn. And that's a good thing, but it means that your victories come at a price. By the time you're me, you're the kind of the personal Pyrrhic victory.
Younger: What does that mean?
Older: Well, you'll have trouble with your studies soon enough - in fact, it's already started. But - eventually - you fight back, and you pass enough units. But if you'd taken a sidestep and looked at what else you could do, you might have been better off. Maybe, maybe not. It's one of the problems of being bullheaded - you achieve the objective, no matter what the cost. But it tires you out, until by the time you finish here you have to take whatever job presents itself just to pay off the student overdraft, and then it's easier to just stay in that job than move on anywhere else, and you end up like me - chunky and wondering why you're doing what you do.
Younger: But you can't change any of this, right?
Older: Right.
Younger: So what's the point? Isn't this just fatalism?
Older: Maybe. Here's the thing. There's so much I would change about you, here, now. Preferably even five or six months ago, I'd like to ask you to consider doing things differently. But the life I have now - even if it is a quiet, singular sort of a life, without the wife, the house, the children - even in it's own tranquil way, it's kind of amazing. And that's the trade-off - you go through all this, this shit for the next two years, you start to wonder what the point of everything is, and then... You realise.
Younger: Realise what?
Older: That life isn't about knowing what you should be doing. One thing you'll always be jealous of is the people with the uncurved arrows - they grew up knowing what they wanted to do, with a straight, sure path. People with conviction, people who seem to know exactly why they're here. But here's something to consider; they're kind of boring.
Younger: How does that work?
Older: Well, you'll skip around a lot of courses in the next thirty-six months, but you'll experience a lot of different things, and you'll actually find a 'passion' that endures. It means that instead of spending your life concentrating on one thing and one thing only, you'll find things that interest you, work on them until they don't, then discard them, whether you should have or not. Meanwhile, the uncurved arrows will be doing the same thing, day in, day out, until they stop, for whatever reason.
Younger: But at least they find work doing what they love, right?
Older: For the most part, yes. But--
Younger: So if I only had a proper vocation now, things would be a lot easier?
Older: I didn't say that. And even if I did, it wouldn't matter, because--
Younger: Right, right. Causality.
Older: Okay, look. This is just the way things are. I'm talking to you because I'm trying to understand how I got to be the way I am now. There's not much else to it. But... Not to sound stupid, but batten down the hatches, kid. There's a storm coming for you.
Younger: Thanks for that...
*
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