I don’t know what I wanted, and I don’t remember why I wanted it. I only know I didn’t want to live in a cheap studio apartment an hour away from work, with no friends and no one to talk to aside from my parents and sisters.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Greatness is reserved for people with names like Julius Caesar or Queen Elizabeth. Nobody remembers people like Ellen Thompson, someone who once had grand ambitions, or at least ambitions of doing something grand. Then the student loans came due and real life came crashing down. Now all I can do is try to remember what it was like to believe I could be great someday.
When I was in high school, I dreamed of being a professional singer. The kind who walks into the audition room and the next day they’re on a giant stage in front of a crowd of millions singing about how the modern world sucks and things would be better if we just listened to each other. My parents told me that was stupid. I’m pretty and my voice is decent, but if you want to be a singer, you can’t just be decent, you need to be amazing.
So I gave on singing and went to college. I got a degree in business, because nothing else interested me, and I got a job. Then I got another job. Then the pandemic hit, and I ended up stuck in my house trying my best to work from home. Then I had to go back to work because my boss was convinced that the only way to motivate us to work hard was to make us face death. Then, adding insult to injury, my favorite singer since high school, Julius Corvin, decided to get involved in NFTs. I was enraged, but nobody else seemed to mind.
The only real joy I have any more is the hours I get to myself in my apartment. Even for cheap apartments, it’s awful. There’s no soundproofing, the plumbing’s always breaking, there’s no insulation, and the landlord never answers the phone. But it’s mine, and I put up some foam pads to turn it into a studio of a sort to live out my dreams of being a singer.
I don’t have many hits yet. Okay, I don’t have any hits at all. I don’t think any of my videos has gotten above a double-digit view count. I keep telling myself it’s alright, everyone starts small, the next one could be a hit, but then the next rent check comes and I calculate how much I spent on gas, and I get another bill from my student loan provider, and I look around at my apartment, with it’s cheap paint job and ugly ceiling and furniture from my parents and thrift stores, and wish that I had just a little bit more money, just enough to not feel like I’m on the edge of failure.
I’m trying to write my big break now. It’s a song called “The Future”, based on the line from Julius Corvin’s song “Memories”, “My past was bleak, but the future is bright and free”. I was listening to it the other day and thinking about how wrong he was. I know the song was written in 2012 but looking back I’m not sure why I thought the future was bright. I saw my parents both lose their jobs in the recession. I saw my older sister lose her soul to the law office she worked at. I saw my younger sister demonstrate, time and again, that she had no dreams and ambitions and was determined to waste her life away. And I know hindsight is 20-20 but looking back I’m not sure why I thought He Who Must Not Be Named would lose the election, and I’m not sure why I thought Biden could do any better.
My parents keep saying that the worst is behind us. We’ve got a decent president again, the world’s opening back up, and we can resume our normal lives at last. Soon the republican party will wake up from this awful nightmare and become a sensible party again, and we can put all this awfulness behind us and pretend it never happened. I don’t believe them. Hearing them talk about how things will go back to normal is like hearing them insist that Santa Claus is real despite the fact that I’m an adult. The news keeps talking about how Covid isn’t going away, that it’s just going to end up being endemic and we’ll eventually forget it’s there. I keep hearing think pieces about how what happened last January wasn’t a fluke, that the monsters who made it happened still have enough power to make it happen again, and it’s only a matter of time until they do. I go into work every day, and I look up at a giant building built by people who have so much more money than I will ever make, let alone have at one time, and I wonder why people don’t understand the increasing calls for change, by any means necessary. My boss keeps talking about how to revolutionize the business, talking about how technology will make us grow and help us become more profitable, and he keeps saying his boss will invest in things that honestly turn my stomach, but I don’t think I can leave because aside from leftover stimulus money I have no savings, and there’s no way my parents will support me. They’ve got enough on their plates trying to keep my sister studying enough to not flunk her junior year of high school.
I wonder if I should stream myself singing. I don’t know if anyone would watch it, but it sounds like fun, and I badly need fun right now. It feels like everything else is trying to rip itself apart as fast as possible. But I don’t want to stream until I’ve finished “The Future”. It’s the best song I’ve ever written, I’m sure it is, but right now all I’ve got written is the chorus:
Is this my present, or is it a prison?
I keep belting out my thoughts, but nobody wants to listen.
Have I committed a cardinal sin? Will I ever be forgiven?
Because this isn’t the life I was planning on living.
I’ll be the first to admit the lyrics aren’t great. I can’t seem to write anything good no matter how hard I try. The music isn’t any better. I mostly just want to get my thoughts out there where people can hear me, even if nobody does.
People keep talking about how there isn’t any community anymore. Is that why it feels like I can never talk about things that are bothering me? I remember having a huge group of friends in both high school and college, but now it just feels like I’m living my life parelel to everyone else. I can see them, they can see me, but we never interact. I keep thinking that once my schedule clears up, I’ll leave my apartment and make the friends I badly wish I had, but I never seem to have the energy. And with Covid, I don’t even know if it would be safe to try.
The only time I see anyone is when my parents invite me over for dinner, and I only go because I feel awful every time I refuse, and there’s so much going on at work I usually have to. I know that we’re all vaccinated, and both my parents work from home anyway, but I just don’t feel safe going over to their place. I don’t know why.
Maybe it’s because I have to go into the office every day and most weekends. I don’t know how many of my coworkers are vaccinated, though we all wear masks so I’m sure that it’s safe, in theory at least. But we don’t talk to each other except in meetings, and nobody seems to want to be there anyway. We’re losing people and we can’t seem to get new ones in, so I keep having more and more work piled on me, but I haven’t seen a pay raise. I keep working overtime, because I don’t want to tell my parents that I didn’t try my hardest to keep my job.
I wish I wasn’t such a good person sometimes. My younger sister gets away with all kinds of awful behavior because she’s done it so long nobody expects her to be any better. If I screwed up more often, swore at my parents, yelled at my sisters, told my boss where he can stick his attitude, then I would be free to be who I want to be, instead of somebody my parents wanted me to be when I was a child.
But it’s too late. I can’t change who I am. And life isn’t going to get better, no matter what my parents say.
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