Bopping Along

It feels like my brain is in another country at least 80% of the time. I spend a lot of energy inventing a romantic, cool life for myself in some city that I know just enough about to conjure up a hazy picture of how things would be. Having so much free time during quarantine has given me more than enough space to embellish the fantasy, which I'm learning may not be such a good thing. I'm learning to quit before I start searching "lejlighed til leje københavn" and filter the apartments by my imaginary price range.

Maybe it says something about what I Actually Want that the fantasy life always involves living somewhere else, or at least traveling in a way that lets me actually get to know places. Now that I'm inarguably in my twenties (doesn't it feel like 21 doesn't count? Like it was a fun little mini-era), I find myself getting really worked up about whether I will accidentally miss out on the things I want to do. Plus, I'm told (by... the internet? I guess?) that your early twenties are a good time to figure out what those things even are. So here I am, sitting cross-legged all day in my apartment, figuring it out and waiting for the world to open back up so I can test out my theories.

Here's where I'm at right now- in the last couple months I changed where I live and who I live with. In a span of two weeks at the end of June, I bailed out of an apartment in New York, found a new one in Austin, and moved into it, alone. I forget about the New York apartment all the time, but every now and then I give myself compliments for sending that email to the scary Greek broker and having the foresight to block his number. It's fine, there was no financial exchange or anything- the breakup had weirdly good timing. But wow, I had to block the number of a Greek real estate broker in New York City the day after ending a long-term relationship! And two weeks later, I was sleeping on a mattress loaned to me by the store until they delivered the real one, to my new but very unfurnished home.

Since then, I have been living a nice little life, complete with a puppy named Elmer, some ill-advised mishaps on Tinder, lots of cooking, and a few sweaty encounters with Chloe Ting's workout videos. Overall, I'm doing fine, which seems weird. Things are always less scary than you expect, I guess. I really like what I've made for myself. The main issue is that I keep fantasizing about future-me having cocktails and meeting interesting people in London (or Paris, or Lisbon), without any kind of timeline as to when I will be able to do those things. But none of us know very much right now, so I try to take it in stride and keep bopping along with whatever I've actually got going on. In any case, welcome to the pretend vacation.

-Helen