I surround myself with a haggard group of mismatched “friends.” The vast majority “friends” with each other. All of us semi-adults. The married / might as well be married who thought that getting married would make the world right. They’d be the adults they’d always wanted to be. And the single / broken hearted who can’t envy the partnered in our lives because we know how sweet our freedom feels, yet also can’t help but be green eyed over just having someone to fill the other side of the bed at night. And all longing for something. The one that just slipped our grasp, left us so broken hearted that we struggle to let them go. We shove the fact that we miss them aside as much as we can until a lonely night on a bar stool comes along and it just comes back.
A group of semi-adults with college degrees working in low end retail jobs because they can’t get jobs in their field. So they’re working along side the rest of us who are college drop outs / just general fuck ups.
We’re all stuck in this state of semi-adulthood. Realizing marriages didn’t make us grow up. Longing for that person that broke our hearts so badly, while filling the void they left behind with our other broken hearted friends. Hoping our college degrees weren’t a waste of hard work and money. Almost glad to be a fuck up and not have “wasted” all that time and money on college while we work our dead end retail jobs that pay just well enough to scrape by.
Some of us have a kid or four, most don’t understand what that life is like.
And it just amazes me that there is just so many of us. In various stages of our 20’s and very early 30’s just waiting to live that grown up life we’ve always wanted. Waiting on that big kid job that’ll justify that expensive degree. Or, like me, worried that this is it.
This is my life. 29, working retail management, getting paid well enough (more than my friends with degrees), lonely and broken hearted wishing I still had him in my life while I fill his void with my broken hearted friend who’s wishing he still had the one who got away. Single Mom of the most amazing daughter in the world. Laying in bed late at night thinking, “is this it? In a year am I still going to be headed out late at night to go meet up and share a moment with someone? Five years? Ten? What am I going to do when I’m pushing 40? Will I still working retail management? Single? Lonely? Taking what I can get but never getting enough?”
And I look around at the majority of my friends and realize they don’t know what they’re doing either. We’re all lost and realizing we’ve fucked up our dream in one way or another, and we can’t go back and fix it.
Sometimes you can’t make a new dream, you just go on living life trying to recover.
