Another afternoon.
“I so don’t want to end up like that.”
She spits it out with scathing contempt, in resounding harmony to the chords of underlying judgementalism composed by she and her friends.
She would not be like that. Heaven forbid. She refers to the scores of people - five, ten, fifteen years her senior - with a sort of pity polluted by self-righteousness. It is a pleasurable past-time to sit with her peers, clicking their tongues and shaking their heads into their decaf skinny lattes.
I so don’t want to be a slave to my mortgage. I so don’t want to leave it too late to have kids. I so don’t want to stay in the same job, so don't want to live with in-laws, so don't want to raise my kids in the same way my parents raised me…
And in this fashion the afternoon meanders. Days of youth spent on sweeping vows of idealism, passionately drawn, fervently defended.
And what becomes of her in ten years’ time? In the strange clarity of retrospection, will she and her friends wallow in their mistakes and weep at the disparate selves that they have unwittingly become? Or will they laugh at their kindergarten thinking in days of old, painted in primary colours and simplistic assumptions?
There is no way of knowing. But perhaps that explains the cloud lingering above them. It has the unmistakable scent of fear. Of what may lie ahead, how they might change, who they might become. A fear that drives them to these conversations, again and again, soothing their insecurity, reassuring their fate.
Still, there is no way of knowing. Life meanders on, as does the afternoon.
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