Living in Rewind

I seem to be living my life backward.

At 25, I was in a committed relationship, sleeping in a king-sized bed, sharing a bank account, looking into having children and buying real estate, cooking the sort of three course meals each night that my mother might have made.

We were completely independent from our parents, seeing them only on holidays, putting our couplehood before our families.

My partner and I had a commitment ceremony when we were both 22; we wrote our own vows and our friends read poetry. Our white dresses look bright in old photos. Our faces look bright, too, and impossibly young.

By 25, we were an old, established couple, together for five years, planning for 50 years in the future.

At 29, I was living with a different girl, a “girlfriend,” now, not a partner, our finances in tumult, our future tentative and uncertain and our present divided sharply between “hers” and “hers,” our bed a cozy queen.

At 32, I was living alone, and liked it. I was a wild child, single but dating multiple women at once, flirting with any girl who glanced my way. I took up cigarettes. I took up cosmopolitans. I took up Internet dating, and speed dating, and hitting-on-girls-in-bars dating. I got a tattoo. When my flag football team named itself “The Ladykillaz,” teammates joked that it was named for me.

Or maybe they weren’t joking.

Now, here I am a month from 35, living in a Manhattan apartment with two roommates in their mid-20s. My single bed is almost close enough to my desk to serve as a chair. I come home from after-work activities and scarf down frozen dinners, or (I can’t believe this) ramen noodles. The only big difference between me and my roommates is that they stomp home at two or three or four in the morning, and on weekdays I’m asleep by ten.

I’ve reconnected with high school friends. I’m single. I’m not dating. I haven’t even kissed a girl in four months.

This is all very strange. Next thing you know, I’ll be back in a dorm room---or worse, back in the closet.

Nah.

A dorm room, maybe. The closet? Not in this lifetime, my friend.

Unless we’re talking about “a” closet, not “the” closet, because if I ever want to live in Greenwich Village or Chelsea instead up the cold reaches of upper, upper Manhattan where my single bed stretches out now, than a closet is probably where I’ll be living.

Otherwise, no closet for me. Still, a single room in a three-bedroom apartment in NYC is not where I would have imagined myself a year ago. In fact, a year ago I had planned to be on a trip this month to India, where I could check out the camel fair in Rajasthan and wander the grounds of the Taj Mahal.

Even six months ago, I was still living in Chicago, checking out India airfares.

Five years ago, I probably thought I’d be married with kids by now. Ten years ago, I believed that I would pass 35 as a PhD graduate with a house, a published book, and a career in academia, still living with that first partner and our children.

Yet it is this very unpredictability of life that makes it seem so stable and reassuring. When times are hard—when I hate my living quarters or job or dating situation—I simply remind myself that yes, life sucks now, but I can’t even imagine what my world will be like in a year.

We have no way to predict where life will take us. We can’t know. We can only make the choices that seem right to us at the time and follow the curving path of coincidence, work, and luck wherever it leads.

So yes, my life is running backwards. I was in a committed relationship back when most people were in the early stages of casual dating; I had responsibilities.

And now, when most of my friends are settled with young children, I find myself living a young adult’s life, bringing my laundry home to my mom once a month, thanking her when she drops by with groceries and toilet paper.

I’m adjusting to a life most of my peers have already lived. But that’s OK. In the scheme of things, I’d rather live my life backward than not live it at all.

Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning, syndicated columnist living in New York. Email her at jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com; read her semi-regular blog at jennifervanasco.com.

Living in Rewind

Wednesday, November 29, 2006