"Your life's ambition achieved," ElectricPotatohead says when I tell him I now live in London. Incisive and reductive, just how I like my old friends. I follow that thought down a shallow ditch and come upon the distressingly unoriginal realization that begins and ends with the phrase "Now what?"
I walk from my mews house to work on late November mornings amid Christmas lights and autumn leaves. I walk back home past the overspill from pubs filled with people laughing and drinking and smoking. I walk my dog in centuries old parks and talk about breed and age with people in waxed coats with corduroy collars. I see friends on weekends, dressed in Max Mara versions of the Zara clothes I used to buy. I buy groceries at M&S and make jacket potatoes for dinner. This is everything I ever wanted and nothing is the way I thought it would be, just how I like life to go.
The little interlude of two years that was Paris, the decade in New York that preceded that, the near-decade spent in the Far East and the sixteen years spent at home. These are my markers - vivid and alive in my imagination, dead and buried for all intents and purposes. A dichotomy I seem to have been conditioned my entire life to meet. All lessons variations on how best to contain one's overreactions. Gratifying then, that I meet every change these days with a trained equanimity - acknowledged and managed in terms of expectations. Pleased when required, prepared for disappointment anyway.
And yet, every morning I pinch myself as I walk past streets and people I used to long for. The only constant thought in my mind these days is the young girl who dreamt of what I have now. The only standard I aspire to meet is the one she painstakingly, carefully, quietly set all those years ago. She would be proud of me.
My sister tells me to send love back to my past selves. She says I can't really heal, I can't really be ready to meet the future if I am still lacking somewhere in my past. She shouldn't worry, after all. The old me, and the other one, and the one before that - they are all here, bedazzled and bemused.
