Meeting My Younger Self for Coffee (After Jennae Cecelia)

Today I met my younger self for coffee.

Little place with a high ceiling, layout that spreads in multiple irregular directions finishing in alcoves bathed in light. Sense of maximizing space. Privacy. Nice to be able to talk unselfconsciously, other tables far enough away that conversations become white noise. Words evaporating into the high ceiling fans.

Wood-paneled interior, low lighting, and framed newspaper stories, styled on a time that no longer exists. Kinda place you see in old movies. Private dicks treating troubled runaways to pancakes in exchange for information. Sad couples trying to get it right over coffee. Lonely nighthawks sitting at the counter. You like to feel transported when you go places. That’s something that won’t change about you.

That’s why I chose it. Make you feel like one of those characters going through something important.

The aesthetic so often the deciding factor in going somewhere. You don’t like to admit it because it sounds shallow. But the need to feel elsewhere is strong at your age. To belong to important and faraway things. You’re wowed by newness. To take up space in these other worlds, a kind of relief, a validation, as though to disprove a deep-seated fear that you don’t fit in anywhere. That you’re innately embarrassing, a loser in every context.

I hope my choice of place can help transport you for a moment. The way walking up the marble staircase of the Bristol Library and sitting in the old, pew-like desks of the upstairs study hall transports you now. Of course, you go there because in college you have no friends and you’re terrified of eating lunch alone on campus. Knifelike pain at the memory. But it was nice to pretend you were some kind of Russell Group PhD student, working on something destined to be transformative.

We both get there early. Another thing that hasn’t changed in the past 15 years. Arrive late and you’re ceding control of the event. Ah, look at you. I forgot about the hat phase after you left school. Obsession with newsboy caps, desire to look continental. Early 20^th century dockworker maybe. Who’s this chimney-sweep-looking motherfucker just walked into second-period Film Studies.

The what-were-you-thinking pain at the remembrance turned quickly into hot anger, no wonder you were such a fucking loner, stupid to think people would find you mysterious and interesting, people can see right through those affectations; the hot anger of it, the embarrassment, just as quickly cooling, disappearing into an onrushing, protective kind of love.

Can’t blame you really. Normal to leave school, fuck that place, and try on new hats—in this case literally. Never thought about clothes before you went to college. Grew up in hoodies and tracksuits and football shirts. Left school left Nailsea left any connection to the past behind—total ban on denim. That was funny. It was the chino-and-button-down economy. All the eBay purchases for vintage overcoats. The absolute desperation you had for a new identity. To carefully curate it, define it for yourself this time. At school it was created for you. You accepted what they said you were. Gormless, shy, awkward, ugly, freak, pussy. Can’t blame you for the urgency to become something, anything else.

Feel bad now for getting angry when I saw you. Normal I guess to cringe at your younger self, but unfair most of the time. So I insist on treating you—oh that’s right, you don’t drink coffee yet. Not until you’re in Texas, seven years later. That would put a smile on your face, to know you’d be in Texas of all places. Drinking coffee and writing blogs and loafing around in outdoor pools. I smile, thinking how goddam happy you’d be if I told you that was coming. And that you’d be there because of pure circumstance, because you fell in with these Americans with whom you felt like your authentic self, that you wouldn’t have to try to be anything, or think about what to say.

I get you a shake instead. Iced mocha for myself, enjoy the amused surprise in your face. That crudely shaven, acne-spangled mug. But what about the face looking back at you? The one lying inexorably in wait. Probably you’re disappointed I’m wearing glasses. Don’t worry, you’ve still got a good ten years before your eyesight goes tits-up. At least I’ve still got all my hair, you’ve got to be pleased about that. And I’ve figured out what to do with it. Tidy little cut that makes sense, pomade keeping it neat and presentable. No more of that godawful mullet (no offense).

You want to know if we made it. Did we make it? Or are we still waiting for it to happen? How long will I have to wait, your eyes are saying. Difficult to answer. I can tell you the dream hasn’t died, not yet at least. Thirty-two years old and still writing. But did we make it yet? Not in the way you’re thinking. There’s no book deal, no one knows your name, you won’t see yourself on a shelf in Waterstones. You didn’t become the millennial Salinger. But you’re going to write things in your twenties, and some of them, just a few lucky short stories, are going to get published.

That makes you happy. Might not be famous, but it’s a relief for you to hear. To feel like you’re not nothing. That you should keep going with it. Looking at you I remember how faraway it felt, the dread that it would never happen, all the time you spent imagining what you’d do if it did.

That scene from The Simpsons where Bart gets a dinner invite from Lovejoy’s daughter, struts down the street to “Stayin’ Alive”, self-satisfied smirk on his face. You promised yourself you’d reenact it if you ever published something. Well, I can tell you at least that you kept that promise. Two Raymond-Carver-esque stories you’ll publish in the 2014 Southern Universities Short Story Competition, twelve winning entries and two of them yours. Third year of university, the last semester before graduation. You’ll remember your promise to yourself, rush outside like a mad man, Bee Gees on your iPod, strutting around Winchester like Bart Simpson.

Little victories like that will keep you going. Nothing dramatic happens to you, I’m afraid. You won’t live an extraordinary life. You won’t be tested to your limits. Living on the edge too hard, too scary. You’ll be in the middle somewhere with everyone else. Romantic desire to be truly and completely unique, to be in danger even, to be a Byron or a Kerouac, a tumbleweed, to endure extremes, know the limits of human experience—might as well give that up now. You’ll trade it for comfort and security. Fantasies of living week-to-week in boxcars and whorehouses and yurts and Greenpeace anti-whaling boats will give way to easy routines of Pringles and true crime documentaries. You’ll make your peace with not being interesting, decide you don’t have to be extraordinary to live a meaningful life.

Instead you’ll live for little victories like the 2014 Southern Universities Short Story Competition. Like visiting Graceland for Elvis Week in 2012. Dancing with Aaron and Anne-Marie at their wedding in 2018. Moving to London in 2021, the friends you’ll make there too. Publishing your short stories in a collection the next year, seeing your work in print for the first time, best thing you ever did. Plenty to look forward to really. Like everyone else, you’re in for your fair share of suffering and little victories.

No point dwelling on the bad stuff. Part of the human experience. You think that leaving school, the worst of it is over. You want me to tell you that school will be balanced out by an adult life where you get everything you feel like you deserve, all the things you missed out on. Doesn’t work that way. Universe indifferent to your existence. There’s no higher power meting out good fortune to compensate for unhappiness. Not everyone has their “time”. Life not a set of predefined milestones. Unfortunately you still believe that. Important that you know that nothing is waiting for you. Have to go out and grab it by the nutsack, or time will pass you by.

Adulthood not something that kicks in one day. You’ll still be you, as you are now more or less, with little changes in perspective and temperament brought about by time. Subtle changes that slowly, imperceptibly take root in the wake of experience. You think that adulthood means becoming Dad. That one day you’d wake up fully capable and fully grown, nothing left to learn, able to navigate the world with complete certainty. Our father representing the superlatives of rationality and competence. That’s why adulthood felt so distant maybe. Older than him now when he had us. Isn’t that crazy. You’re looking at me and you don’t see Dad, do you? No. There’s no separation between the adult-self and the adolescent, not really—there’s just you. World doesn’t suddenly make sense one day. There’s just one you, winging it, immutably fallible. Maybe that’s how Mum and Dad felt raising us, though it’s hard to imagine. Believe more as I get older that we never stop being children.

Time running out. Hard to know what to tell you and what not to tell you before we say goodbye. Wasn’t expecting it to be hard to look at you. Little deflating to realize that a lot of your problems would still be here fifteen years later—the procrastinating, the wasting time, the not knowing how to help yourself get what you want. Realize now that it was futile to think you could wholly detach yourself from the past. This fantasy of “starting over” you have. That it’s as simple as going somewhere new. If anything, the past imposes itself upon you harder the more you try to outrun it. Try to escape and get yanked back on the choke-chain. Your experiences are a part of you whether you like it or not. If you’re anything at all, you’re the accumulation of everything that’s happened to you. Turn 25, turn 30, go to the USA, go to London, the weight of the past stays with you. Take everything you have away, you’ll still have that.

Understand that now. It’ll take the full length of your twenties to really get it, but you’ll accept there can only ever be one you.

And what do you think, looking at me? Disappointed maybe, but good for you to realize those idealized images you had of me were the stuff of pure fantasy. Perfectly strong, perfectly confident, perfectly sophisticated, and perfectly capable. Everything you saw in others that you wanted, all your deficiencies topped up, like you’ve been waiting all your life for a system update.

Don’t worry—you’ll abandon this idea that you’re a round peg in a world of square holes. Other people not as complete as they seem.

And despite all the things that won’t change for you, you must be pleased by the things that do. In fact there are some stark differences between us. You’ll become a lot less lonely. You’ll learn how to start conversations, how to lead them even. You’ll grow a network of people that love you. In America you’ll be taken in by a family of colorful, salt-of-the-earth Wisconsinites. In London you’ll be adopted by a circle of bookish gay women. You’ll maintain the friends you grew up with as well, and you’ll get even closer to your brother—relying on him in a way you don’t now and haven’t before.

You’ll live a completely independent life, with a house and a career and a gym membership and a set of go-to recipes. A barber down the street that knows your hair and a café that knows your order. A prescription you’ll stick to and a slow cooker you’ll rely on. You’ll take comfort in routines. You’ll learn how to communicate in different ways. Discover you thrive in interviews. Figure out how to turn your nascent skills into something economically viable. You’ll develop a love of highball cocktails and photography and the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda. You’ll lose your fear of dogs. You won’t be scared to do things alone, like flying halfway around the world. You’ll get better at phone calls and public speaking. And you’ll actually go back and finish God Emperor of Dune.

How was the shake? Maybe there was more you wanted to know, but we’re out of time. Time marches inexorably forward, gathering mass and pushing you faster as it goes. You can’t stay here worrying about the future, and I can’t hang around dwelling on the past.

The only way is forward.

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—Inspired by the poetry of Jennae Cecelia