What I Want

My lovely friend Juliet (hannah hooper. on here, i believe) posted about this on facebook. It's a challenge for any writer or really anyone to write 1000 words about what you want to do in life, and I had nothing else to do, so I did it. It's 1030 words and absolutely rough, but, yeah.....

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I want to go live in a big city, LA or New York or San Francisco or Chicago or London, and sleep on a mattress in a small apartment with a boy who speaks Spanish or Latin, who’s older than me and can grow a beard or grow his hair really long and plays the trumpet and will let me turn our bathroom into a darkroom. I want to stay up all night on barstools studying the human brain and I want to wake up sweating late at night in the summer and watch him smoke on the roof of the apartment building with a great view of the city but too much pollution to see the stars.

I want to trust someone with my whole heart. I want that boy to call me in sick to work in the winter so we can wear mittens inside and keep each other warm. I want to try a million different kinds of earl grey or Darjeeling tea and go to Disneyland Paris in the middle of the winter.

I want to never try a cigarette and know fine wines. I want to go to NYU or UCB or UCLA and study psychology or medicine or film. I want to work on the set of a big-time movie one summer, even if I’m only picking up after not-even-famous people. I want to ride trains with lovers and wear shocking colors underneath lab coats or scrubs.

I want to leave home before I’m eighteen and lie about my age once or twice so I can feel a little bit like the vulnerable, rich, white jailbait that I am. I want to run away on tour with a band and take analog photos or sell shirts and fall asleep on top of people whose hands are calloused from playing bass guitars and twisting open beer bottles. I want to be dominated, sleep with girls in short skirts while we’re both hitting that violently curious stage full force. I want to bind my breasts and lose a tooth in a fight and collect bruises that look like nebulae from all the girls I kiss. I want to fail a class and I want to be a disaster, just for a little while.

I want to travel to India and Japan and Morocco and grow my hair down to my ass. I want to disappear from the real world and move to a village in Central America to be a doctor. I want to hold newborn babies and still-beating hearts and paint my face with berries or blood and I want to grow old in Tuscany or Provence or Napa and have an old black tomcat with no ears that’ll have tabby kittens with the neighbors’ calico. I want fourteen goats and acres of lavender or olive trees.

I want to get married in a pink dress in a chapel in the middle of nowhere in Midwest with my friends from websites as bridesmaids. My honeymoon will be the road trip home in a groaning old car, but then we’ll go to some Caribbean island a few months later for absolutely no reason.

I want to run away from something wearing really, really high heels. I want to photograph a fashion show. I want someone to publish my writing after I die. I want to spend months alone in a shitty one-bedroom apartment, unable to sleep and too hungry to eat and just be lonely for a while, because everyone deserves to be.

I want to live off of Ramen and cheap tea with the boy and write reviews of leaked CDs for teenage fanzines and I want to learn to like eggplant. I want to dress up like Alice and The Mad Hatter with him on Halloween. I want to make him listen to Korean boy bands and pick his favorite member. I want to co-queen a fandom and read everything by Hemingway and get hundreds of dollars out of ATMs because I can and write a long novel that I really, truly enjoy. I want to have one son, and I want to give him my last name because otherwise nobody else will carry it on.

I want to pass out; I want to jump off a balcony at a concert. I want to hug all sorts of musicians: Andrew Dost, William Beckett, Hayley Williams, a million more.

I want to marry someone a foot taller than me and I want our son to be six inches in between us, but ultimately I don’t really even want kids, I want to daydream. I never want to stop living and I want to belong everywhere – I want to be able to leave home at will but always come back and feel welcomed. I want my kids, if I have them, to run away too and to have experiences.

I want to live with Emmen for a while and get married in New York and cuddle a lot but then amicably divorce and marry guys because marriage is so bourgeois anyway and why not do it a million times?

I want to be nocturnal for a while and I want to write stories on the boy’s skinny stomach. I’d like a few small tattoos in really hidden places that only he knows about, and I’d like him to do them. I never want to pierce my earlobes, but perhaps I’d get my cartilage or my medusa, something cute but not obvious.

I want to dye all of my hair turquoise and wash all the dye out into a bathtub at once. I want to steal his striped tee shirts and make them smell like my perfume. I never want to like coffee. I want to work in a restaurant kitchen cooking the things mom taught me how to cook, spaghetti alla carbonara and roast chicken with lemon and rosemary and mashed potatoes. I want to learn how to make grandma’s pie crust before she dies.

Ultimately, though, I’ll probably never do most of these things. Truly, all I want to be in life is happy and adventurous, and if I can accomplish that, I’ll be fine.