I want to do everything, be everything
I want to be a dozen people before I die, each one walking away with a pocket full of life, with drawers full of postcards and fossils and candies and receipts. I want to be so full of stories that when I open my mouth, they spill out like coins, like jewels, clattering and bright.
I want it all: the limelight and the laurels, the cold steel of ambition and the soft hands of love, the honking of cars and the music of birds. I want to press my lips to every experience until my mouth bruises, to stretch myself thin across the surface of the world like too little butter on too much bread, to gather every bright fragment of what’s possible and sew them into a patchwork quilt big enough to cover the sky, twice.
I want to pin the bright butterfly of each moment under glass and catalog it, to conduct an orchestra and play all the instruments at once, to origami-fold myself into every possible version—a scholar, a pianist, a spy, a veterinarian, an architect, a bellydancer…
I want to learn how to butcher fish in a Tokyo sushi bar at 11 p.m. and pour champagne in a silk dress at midnight in Paris, I want to know what it feels like to win a chess match in a smoke-filled room full of old men in Buenos Aires and to lose one spectacularly on a park bench in Berlin, I want to read every great novel, burn every bad dinner, drive fast along dark, empty roads with no destination, I want to speak seven languages fluently and invent one myself, I want to get sunburned on a boat I can’t afford, hold a baby goat in Morocco, steal a flower from a royal garden in Vienna, I want to watch Tom Ford sketch fantabulous gowns and Mitsuko Uchida play Mozart, I want to stand under the rose petals fluttering down through the Pantheon Oculus on the feast of Pentecost, I want to have my back cracked like a glow stick by a Thai masseuse, I want to see the northern lights from a rooftop hot tub and share a bowl of cherries with my best friend in the heat of late July. I want to sing karaoke in a foreign city where nobody knows my name and laugh so hard that my stomach hurts and every time I think about it I’ll smile like an idiot in line at the grocery store, because all of it—all the empty oyster shells and sunrises I almost slept through—feels better than sitting still and watching the door close. I also want a pet tiger (I’d name him Tsar).
I want to touch every beautiful terrible thing before it dissolves. I want to pick the stars from the night sky, eat them dipped in every flavor the spice market has to offer and feel them burn in my belly. I want to keep my eyes open so wide they bleed because if I blink even once I’ll lose it, the world will vanish like sugar in a cup of tea, like a dream I forgot to write down, and I’ll be left alone on the platform chasing after a departing train, waving goodbye and blowing kisses at a man I love being sent off to war.
I want to write and to be read, to be alone and to be adored, to slip away into the woods, and to sit at the head of the table. I want to feast until I am merry, to sleep until I am new, to run and return, crying tears of homecoming.
I want to love without limit and lose without grief. I want to split myself into a thousand lives each burning at both ends, I want to never stop moving, never stop reaching, never stop wanting—even if I get nauseous from the unbearable lightness of being—because the minute I stop, the minute I choose which fig to pick, I will have killed every other version of me and buried them without a name.
I’m a greedy, bratty child, a cat down to its last life, a woman with her hands full of dust and diamonds. I want to do everything, be everything, to burn up and to endure. It is not enough to live—I must devour. I must create and transform and destroy and create again, with hands always reaching, then holding on too tight.
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P.S. I wrote a book on this feeling of becoming.
Speaking from the vantage of a few (more, actually) decades down the road, I can report that much of life’s joys comes from creating artfully within its limits, making its choices one’s own.
I think this is the most romantic capturing of the prismatic potentiality and desire of youth that I've ever read.