The Days You Will Have In Your 20s

You are going to have good days with great beginnings. Your poached eggs will fly out of the pan like perfect little spaceships. Last night’s embarrassments will fizz away into vapour and you will simply peel yourself out of your hangover, leaving it on the bed like some dusty old snakeskin. On days like this you smile at everyone and everyone smiles back at you. Even people’s dogs grin at you as if you are the kind of human being that they could aspire to be someday. This is the beginning of the best day for you and you will have many. You’re living off sweet coffee, sesame bagels and an influx of opportunity.

You can be doing everything right but every day is different. On some mornings your keys are going to break in your bedroom door before you have even brushed your teeth. Your eggs will overcook and you will be so vexed from the door thing that you won’t even appreciate how lucky you are to poach eggs every morning. Last nights liquors will coat the inside of your mouth and your vision will be hazy, instead of putting sugar in your coffee you accidentally stare into your future with a cold sense of doubt. This is a bad start to your day and they are inevitable.

The coping mechanisms that have got you so far in life will short-circuit sometimes. The little switch on the back of your brain that gives you a sense of humour will get stuck. The time is ripe for shattering a well-meaning comment to pieces using just your new-age pessimism. When somebody says “hey nice jumper” and all you can think is that you didn’t really choose this jumper, it chose you. All kinds of sadness take host in different personal effects, but melancholy always roots itself into the fabric of woolly jumpers on cold days.

So you’re sitting there in your shitty knitwear, smoking even though you’ve quit five times since graduating and you’re re-tracing your steps. Wondering aloud why you’re ‘here’ and not ‘there’.

Forget about here and there just strive to feel lucky. Stub out your cigarette and silence the part of you that feels like some special snowflake that was owed something. At least you graduated, smoking hasn’t killed you yet and not having a fucking clue isn’t going to kill you either.

Use your days to dissect your relationship with drugs and alcohol. If you stay sober today is that a good day or a bad day? If you feel that you don’t have a relationship with drugs that’s great, but everyone does. If you love cocaine, you love it because you love yourself on cocaine. Everyone else hates you though and everyone hates the way you talk at one hundred miles an hour about the fine line between having first world problems and being a first world problem. Take drugs when you’re sixteen and need to feel something. Take them on your fiftieth birthday in a Mexican desert with your second wife. Don’t take them to whittle away the hours on a weekday afternoon because you’re twenties aren’t aligning with what you thought they would be.

You are waiting impatiently at the train station of life. You jump on random trains running on wobbly tracks, for a while the idea was just to keep moving, but essentially you’re not going anywhere. Find a train you want to be on and stay on it, make it your home there until they kick you off and throw your luggage over the side. You’re going to have good days and bad days but keep going and stay on the ride.