happy and lucky you felt when we found this place? I’m sure someone would love to live here! Just have a little faith and we’ll find someone.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you wanted to sell it altogether on this little whim!”
“Yes… wait, so if you’d rather sell it…” We had bought our little house by the sea about six months earlier, after another confusing and crisis riddled period.
“And where would you put the dog? Put him up for rent too?”
“He’d go back to the countryside to live with my dad. He was just fine there last year.”
“No! He’s our dog, so he’s our responsibility. Why should he go live somewhere else again?”
“It wouldn’t be just anywhere. He’s spent half of his life there!”
“You can’t do things like this just on a whim. You just went on that ski trip and now another thing pops in your head, you want to push everything aside and leave again… I can’t believe we’re even discussing this! It’s just so absurd; it’s not even worth talking about it. I have a job, you have a job…”
“But jobs are something that you can leave! Or, let’s say, you can go on leave. Just think what an opportunity for the two of us to go see the world and grow as people.”
“No.”
“I haven’t travelled almost at all. Okay, so there was that one trip to Slovakia!”
“How about Tunisia? And Hungary?”
“Yes, and that’s all there is! I’ve been to three different countries, everywhere for just a week, enough for a little taste, that’s it. But look at how big the world is! And you know what, this guy has some interesting theories about the world! I’m sure being around him would also help us develop in a way. At the same time, with you it would be safer than if I just went alone.”
“That man is insane!”
“No, he’s actually quite the businessman in his own right. He told me how he buys handcrafts from poor countries and sells them in rich ones, making a profit of up to thousand percent sometimes! What he’s saying actually makes perfect sense.”
“And you can really see me selling seashells to tourists in some market?”
“Well, it’s not seashells, it’s beautiful jewellery and things. I can see it, really. Would you at least be willing to meet him?”
“No, I see no reason for that.”
“Please!”
“We have our own life here. All right, we can go away somewhere for a week sometime soon, we’ll find someone to house sit and feed the dog. I’m sure I can get off work for that much…”
“How are you not getting this? I don’t want to go on a phony weeklong tourist trap of a trip! I need to see the other side of the world, something real, something new, something honest! I’m wasting away in this sterile journalist’s life. You are too, even if you don’t realize it yet!”
“This is all just in your head. If you want to, you can develop just the same anywhere. You can read books and…”
“I want to write books!”
“Yes, I know. So go ahead and write. Quit your job and start writing, I’ll take care of you. We don’t have kids – yet – and right now you have all the opportunity you’ll ever need.”
This is a painful subject for me: having kids and becoming a writer are two things that I have been desperately expecting to happen in my life, but yet they always seem to slip away into the future.
“Don’t you see,” I shout. “I’m not moving ahead! I can’t get rid of this journalist’s life! I keep getting hired for new articles, new TV shows. The whole road until my natural end has been paved. The eulogy is already complete. I’m going to waste away to nothing, if I don’t break out of this myself and see the other side of the world. Besides, I feel that somewhere else another reality is waiting for us!” Tom wants to cut in, but I won’t let him, “Remember, you were the one who said how you were wasting away in the army and losing your creative edge? And you wanted to leave, but couldn’t?”
“That’s hardly comparable! You have no idea what my life was like in the Soviet military. Are you seriously comparing your life right now to that! You have the freedom to give your employers notice tomorrow if you wanted to and just start writing your novels.”
“But I’m not ready to write them yet! And the fact that we haven’t had kids – yet – well that’s just our luck, our chance to go out into the world, travel, mature, get ready to move up to the next level. Then we’ll have something to tell our grandchildren that they can be proud of: see, what our grandparents were brave enough to do. They’ll see how everything is possible in this world!”
“I don’t really need my grandchildren to be proud of me going to wander the earth with some deranged hippie to who knows where. I’m happy enough building another floor on this house and redoing all the plumbing. Why do you even think that all this travelling is something you can afford?”
“Everything is possible, if you have faith!”
That’s how we argue, round and round. Dog-job-mortgage-house versus need-to-discover-world-and-self, all this witnessed by our unborn children, for whom we are ready to walk through fire, at least for the sake of the argument.
“Just think what kind of an impression it would leave on your children, leaving like this? What kind of complexes would it give them, knowing that once upon a time, their mother left her home behind and ran away?”
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