One-way ticket, suitcase in my hand, stepping through the door of an apartment I’d never been inside. The rooms were empty in the way new apartments always are: big, cold, a little echoey. Standing there with my hand still on the handle, this sentence showed up in my head: this is us.
I’ve been saying that a lot since I moved. Walking somewhere on a Wednesday afternoon with nothing in particular to do, I’ll catch a block of sun on a building I’ve never noticed before and say it under my breath. Crossing a street I’ve crossed maybe six times now, not enough to be mine but enough to know its shape, I’ll say it. Sitting at a table of people I’ve known for a month, in a neighborhood I’ve lived in for a month, I’ll look around and feel it like a pressure in my chest: this is us.
Underneath all of that is a belief I’ve picked up somewhere along the way, which is that you can do anything your heart truly wants. For me, it’s more like: if you want something enough to actually pay for it, the world tends to let you. That belief is what got me from Minneapolis to Chicago, and from Chicago to here. It’s what turned a one-way ticket into something obvious.
It’s also a trap. I don’t fully know what to do with that yet.
The trap, I think, goes like this. If you really can do anything, then every day you’re not doing the thing is a day you chose not to. The whole world being yours means the whole gap between where you are and where you could be is yours too. And it turns out that gap is its own kind of weight: a running tab in the background of everything, with nobody keeping score but you.
I don’t have a job yet. My savings keep shrinking, one month after the next, and that’s a clock I can hear ticking in rooms where nobody else can hear it. I was at a thing last week. A room of people in tech, most of them building something, most of them good at it. I knew a few faces (maybe three, and only one of them well). I was there with friends, technically part of the conversation but mostly on the edge of it, and I realized about twenty minutes in that I’d been watching the room instead of being in it. Nothing bad had happened. Nobody had been unkind. I was just small in there in a way I’m not small when I’m alone in my apartment, and the clock in my chest was louder than whoever was talking.
Then I was in the back of a car on the way home. The light on the block before mine hit a certain way, and the sentence came back, uninvited again: this is us.
Both of those things were true in the same hour. I’ve stopped trying to pick.
What I traded for the ticket was people, mostly. Minneapolis was home in the deep way, the one my bones knew, where everybody already knew the shape of me before I walked into a room. Chicago was a different version of home, newer, a few friends I was just starting to know when I left. Both of them built out of small ordinary things you don’t think about being a structure until you’ve moved away from them.
And the other versions of myself I’m not getting to be because I picked this one. The Rose who stayed, who would have kept the same coffee shop and the same walk to the train and the same people who already knew her shape. The Rose who made music her whole thing instead of half of it, who spent this year in a studio somewhere instead of a rotating list of Wi-Fi passwords. Me, in the version where I said no to the flight, with more in my savings account right now and less in my chest. Each of them living out a whole year I’m not. Each a little more comfortable than I am, in the boring ways comfort usually is.
None of them are dead, exactly. They just don’t get to type this. And I catch myself, sometimes, missing them the way you miss people.
I keep coming back to Rome, which is a little embarrassing. Rome wasn’t built in a day. I know how cheesy that sounds. It’s a refrigerator-magnet sentence and I know that. I should probably be saying something more insightful than that, but it’s what I’ve got. The other option is believing that a life worth having should be possible to assemble in a single sprint, and when I try to live inside that belief I freeze inside of four hours. So I’ll take the refrigerator magnet.
Maybe “the world is yours” is about the square foot you’re standing on, and the next one, and the version of a life you can actually live inside is the one you build by standing on each of them long enough to pick the one after. The hand tossing the Earth up like a ball in the picture attached to this post is just one hand. One throw at a time, until it either drops the planet or doesn’t.
Honestly, I don’t know yet which of those I’m doing. I don’t think I’m supposed to, at a month and change in. What I do know is that I’m still here. The apartment isn’t empty anymore. There’s a couch, a couple of mugs, afternoon light that falls across the floor in a way I’m starting to recognize. The bank account is smaller than it should be. The inbox is quieter than I want. The mountain is, frankly, enormous. And still, when I walk in the door, the sentence shows up, uninvited as ever. This is us. This is home, and there’s no going back.
The world is yours. It’s also ours. One throw at a time, until we drop the planet or we don’t.