What do I want in this life? If I discount the apartment I cannot buy right now, and if I set aside my never-ending wish for a quiet Sunday morning with someone I love, and if I slide my literary dreams under the carpet and never mention them again, and if I chuck the stray ideas for projects I will never have time to work on into neatly labelled organisers, and if I throw the impossible paths I can no longer take in this life along with the trash when I take it out, not much.
To clarify what I mean by this is that no amount of change, unless it induces emotional whiplash in me, can change my life, that no amount of money, unless a significant sum dropped on me tomorrow, can help me, that no amount of quiet personal comfort can replace a reassuringly restful Sunday, that for all my prolificity, writing is an egoistic undertaking and all literary success boils down to how well you affected the times or the people, that all the things I truly want to work on will continually be towered by the pressing concerns of the eight-hour workday, and that time has marched on and has wound many paths like you would fold a carpet after some event, that the potentials now lie rolled up and gather dust.
And this is what I mean when I tell people I do not want much in life. But then, hell-bent as they are on their lack of understanding, they begin to force the list I have effortlessly shared above with loaded, leading questions. It is offending, and I often leave those conversations with a sour taste. I have thought about this to reach the circular logic of never worrying about the grand path of my life and have slowly built the muscle to think only about the next few weeks or months. And all this effort gets ignored by those who have barely thought about it at all, who want things simply because others want them, who never stop to think what dreams demand, and who fail to see that patience comes with practice, who would not know their dreams if they stood right in front of them.
So, when they talk about dreams I wax poetic and make a smug speech before leaving. Because I have been waiting and working, waiting and working, waiting and working since long before they even began.