Real Life

“This feels like real life,” he said looking out at the traffic from the window of my fourth-story apartment.  I was cooking pasta in the kitchen and we were listening to The Killers on the living room speakers.

Granted, my brother has lived in somewhat of a bubble for the past 24 years, but I knew what he meant.  I don’t know what it is about the four bolts I unlock every time I come home, or the dusty stairwell in my apartment building, or the cigarette lighters on the counter I use to light the gas stove,  or my goldfish, or hailing a bus on a street corner, or sticking the phone bill to the door with a magnet..... But it does feel like real life. 

It is romantic because it is concrete.  After graduation and liberation from the academic machine, the over-thinking under-feeling non-acting intellectuals are lusting to inhale any air that is not theoretical.  We crave the nonabstract.  Something as mundane as making tea with leaves pulled from a plant on the balcony feels almost photo worthy.  Like a kid riding his bike without training wheels, we want to shout, “Look mommy!  I’m doing it by myself!”

Ironically that sensation of so-called reality comes from a construction people like my brother and I have contrived from television advertisements and Hollywood images.  This is what people in the “real world” do, right?   They change their lightbulbs and buy sponges for the kitchen.  They water their plants and go to the bank. They walk anonymously down busy streets and make calls from pay phones. 

The even bigger irony is that this year of my life is probably the farthest from “reality” I could have gone, in that I will likely never live another year with as little responsibility as I have now.  My salary is enough to cover the bills (and some splurges on the side) and my work schedule has yet to impede the social caprices and personal whims that spontaneously pop into my cravings.  I never worry about making ends meet and I spend an embarrassingly little amount of time thinking about my future. I just bustle around in my make believe universe where there is only the present moment.  My life is a theater, a masquerade of adulthood.  

And I’m ok with that.