Hmmm

Do you ever stop and realize that you are at the place in your life that you used to wonder about years ago? You used to ask yourself: what will I look like, what will I do for fun, how will other people view me, how will I view myself, will I be smart, will I be happy? You used to muse about the future, which was so far off, and is now your present reality. When you look around, are you disappointed in what you have become or are you pleased, because you have become something. There is a person to look back on and when you are ten years older, or forty, you will look back on the you that you are now. What do you want to look like on the outside and who do you want to be on the inside?
I sometimes wonder if I’ll be like you. I wonder if I’ll travel the world like you did, and marry a man who can cook or play the guitar or write books. I wonder if I’ll be as educated as you are from a university in England or some other place where people drink tea at five o’clock each day. I wonder if twenty-one year olds will want to be like me the way I want to be like you or if they will not know me at all. I wonder what I will do each day. Will I pick up children – my own children – from school and will they want to tell me how it went or will they heave a sigh from the back seat if I ask? Will I still enjoy icicles and cozy blankets and good books and raindrops heard indoors and the smell of grass when the lawn has just been cut? Will I wear my hair long or will I cut it shorter like yours? Will it be dark or light or somewhere in between? Will you know me then, when I am older?
I think of what I want myself to be in the future but I never come up with a good answer. I think of being a person who teaches, a person to talk to, a person who works with kids and I could be all of those things or none of them, but most of all I want to be happy. What will make me happy when I’m older? Will it be a large porch and a white picket fence or a good movie on a Thursday night or chocolate covered strawberries or the words on a page of my favorite book? What will be my favorite book when I am older than I am now? When I get my PhD will I throw my hat in the air or cry because twenty-three years of classrooms is over and I don’t know what that means? Will I think that my life is beginning or will I feel that it is over? Will I want an adventure, like you had, or will I want to be settled, like the smooth, still pebbles in the vase on my window sill?
When you were twenty-one did you know what you would be? Did you believe that you could be something great or was it luck that made you a butterfly? And if you knew you could be great, are you the great thing you thought you would be or another great thing that you did not expect to be, like lightning or the cream on the inside of chocolate candies? Did you know what was true when you were twenty-one? Did you think you had it all figured out, or did you sometimes sit puzzled when asked about what Virginia Woolf was really saying? I bet you knew what she meant. What did puzzle you? Was it the colors clouds turn at sunset or why penguins can’t fly or why people are the scariest things or why people are the most comforting things or how a whole turtle can fit back inside its shell all at once? Was it why children always dance to music or why sushi doesn’t make you sick or why a picture of a heart means love or how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop?
Yeah. I wonder those things too.