Why Not Me?
One morning I wake up like I’m coming out of a nightmare, and I can’t stand it anymore. All those days exactly the same. Eight to five at the bank, selling retirement plans to divorced women with four kids. Every night making promises, swearing I only love them, before I come on their face. And I don’t want a divorce or four kids of my own. I don’t want to become the story everyone tells about themselves when they’re thirty-five and bitter. One morning I just can’t do it anymore.
That’s when it hits me. I’m living in a world where I can theoretically do and leave whatever I want. There are rules—things about the survival of the species or whatever—but otherwise nothing’s stopping me. I’m actually free.
From films and books and theater I know what’s out there. The world’s full of things worth seeing. You fall in love with a Sherpa in the Himalayas. You swim with dolphins in Hawaii. You stand on Uluru and stare up at the stars and suddenly think you understand something about being alive. You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway. These aren’t fantasies. They happen to people. Why not me?
Most of what keeps me trapped isn’t real anyway. The relationship I hate? I could leave tomorrow. The job? Hand in my notice. The city I’ve resented for years? Get on a plane. It’s habit. It’s laziness. It’s fear—fear I’ll become like all those people on TV who blow their savings on a curry stand in the Philippines and realize halfway through that there’s an actual economy there. Fear I’ll be even more alone than I already am. Fear I’ll lose what I’ve already built, whatever that is.
But this doesn’t mean blowing up my whole life. I mean looking past my own little universe and remembering it’s just one of many. Do something different once and it breaks the hold. Habit, laziness, fear—they lose their grip.
I could book a flight to Stockholm right now. Pull the trigger. The ticket’s cheap, the risk is low. It would be the first real step. But I don’t. I sit here in front of this screen twenty hours a day, tweeting about nothing, watching other people’s shows, jacking off to porn, getting fat and slow and useless, and I can feel myself disappearing into this fake world that shouldn’t even exist. I could get on a plane but instead I’m here. Where I’ve always been.
What am I afraid of? That when I’m dying, my life flashes before my eyes and all I see are bad tweets, stolen TV shows, Russian porn. That I wasted the whole thing. That I’ll regret not taking the leap, and that regret will be the last thing I know.
I know all this. I see it clearly. I understand the contradiction—the freedom and the paralysis existing at the same moment. And I still don’t move. Maybe that’s not a problem to solve but just something to skip past. Maybe the only mistake is looking for an answer when I should just be getting on the plane.