I Mourn a Life I've Never Had

As I sit in my living room, computer on my lap, listening to Nas telling me that death is the cousin of sleep, I can’t help but drift off into my alternate life.

In this other life, I still smoke. I still drink. This version of me is awake at night and sleeps during the day. He takes walks around deserted Los Angeles streets, he watches the sun set on the pacific, and he cruises around Mulholland at midnight with the windows open and the music up.

In this fantasy, I’m also a writer. And I don’t mean a writer like I’m a writer now. And I’m not gate-keeping the term, either. If you write, you’re a writer. But in this other life, I’m a…

writer.

I’ve got the agent e-mailling me asking me how the latest manuscript is doing. I’ve got the tortured writer mentality and a book tour looming. The desk with an old typewriter and a half empty (‘cause I’m a pessimist) bottle of rye.

It’s a vibe.

And then I snap back to reality. The reality where if I tried staying up all night I’d have a three day sleep hangover. The reality where if I still smoked and drank, I very well could be dead already.

The Nas song is over, I click shuffle until I settle on something else to suit my melancholy mood, and get back to work.

I wish this was a rarer occurrence, but these little fantasy trips I take into a different timeline of myself—these peeks into a parallel universe—are like vacations. And, more importantly, they sell me on the future I’m building.

Not because I think that’s what my future is going to be like. I don’t think I even want that future. I think if I actually lived like that, I would be miserable.

Maybe that romanticization is hell, and I’m just trying to stay out of it.

Still. When I’m not checking in on my black and white writer self, I grieve. I grieve because it is a certainty that I will never have that and, regardless of whether I want it or not, the knowledge that I will forever be without it, is a funerary weight on my chest.

So, like a widow, I’ll keep re-living the fantasy and I’ll keep mourning at the knowledge that it’ll never be. And I’ll write blog posts and submit short stories and send out query letters so that I can live a realer, more tangible, and possible fantasy.