We had just finished building it this summer.
We were supposed to have moved on by now. All those years of nomadic life, never quite knowing where we were supposed to be, those years were supposed to be behind us. This was where the rest of our lives was supposed to begin.
But it didn’t.
Why were we having doubts again? Why couldn’t we just be happy with where we already were? It seemed we were never quite happy with what we had already built, always fixated on room for improvement, and here we were on the verge of tearing up the foundations again, merely a few months after the structure was supposed to be completed.
What was wrong with us? Was this normal?
We consulted some of our closest friends. We got no good answers. Continue living there, some said, and see what develops. It always seemed a better configuration was just out of reach, yet to constantly rebuild risked so many years of finished work.
Sometimes I just wanted to run away from it all, leave all the questions behind us, abandon the mess of a structure that almost seemed to attach itself to us, without our consent or control. The nomads hailed us, waved, but we’ve been there before. It wasn’t as great as they made it out to be. But this wasn’t either. We didn’t see any other paved paths before us, but to blaze our own trail meant facing unknowns without the benefit of society’s collective experience.
There was security in a known quantity, if not excitement. We dreamed of more, daily. Maybe we had even moved on before the construction was finished, maybe we just refused to admit it to ourselves. This old place, if four months can even be considered old, will always have a special place in our hearts, but perhaps it was always meant to be a marker for something we passed, not something we continued to revolve around. But the fear of an uncertain future made us hang on to this place like a security blanket.
So we research, study, observe, and research some more, perhaps using that as an excuse to avoid doing what we were afraid to do. Maybe one day we’ll get drunk and finally have the courage to burn it all down, forcing a confrontation with what we had been avoiding, and giving ourselves the chance to begin anew. We had no excuses to get drunk though. Not yet. And so we watched, and waited for an opportunity, justifying our procrastination.
Maybe we’ll still be here in a year, a decade. It might be sad, but it wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. Sometimes we reach our milestones and are afraid to move forward.