I live in adoration of what will be: the future apartments and careers, experiences and successes.
I spend my life planning the next step—the next big moment. I am always looking to the future as a refuge from the anxieties of the present.
My nights are spent fantasizing about a life with a family and career when everything has settled as it is meant to be. I dream of the stability that being a high schooler planning the future does not bring. The present is an existence plagued by apprehension at every decision that may define a facet of my future.
I yearn for this. A life where I can finally settle into the present without a new thing to look forward to, but I know that it will never come. I know this because every time I check off the next big achievement in my life, a new one is filed at the bottom of the never-ending list of my future.
I have always been an over-planner, over-packer, and overthinker, as the need to prepare for the next five possibilities outweighs the need to live in the here and now. I have compiled a list for every problem that may present itself, every story that I have yet to write, and every moment I have yet to live.
Despite the lack of a physical list, there is a mental filing cabinet for every moment of my life yet to come that must be made into memory before the list can dissolve into a childhood figment of distraction. Made simply to escape the incessant worries that accompany the monotony of classes, rehearsals, and perpetual procrastination.
In spite of my longing to be rid of the present, I take every opportunity to distract life from moving forward, opting to waste hours driving to places I don’t need to go rather than allowing myself to move into the next chapter that will diminish this one into a figment of the past.
Perhaps by holding myself back—forcing my life to a standstill—I will learn to live in the moment: take in what the present has to offer. Maybe the long drives to nowhere will reveal the truths that I am too scared to confront as I study mental lists, planning a life that does not yet exist.
Until I am ready for my life to move on past the finality of my childhood, I will continue to waste my precious time with trips to the mall a 45-minute drive away; I will detail every moment of my past in poems that culminate in telling the story of my childhood, which I am scared to abandon for the future that I have painstakingly planned.
I will continue to file away moments that have yet to become memories for the rest of my life, for it will prevent every moment before from becoming an unmeaningful one as it will lead to the eventual culmination of my life. It is then that I will no longer have a present to evade, a past to record, or a future to plan, allowing me to bask in the memories and love that life has given me.
