I always knew my city felt too small for me.
Not because it was wrong.
It was simply too small for all the versions of myself I had not yet met.
When I was seventeen, an aunt who lived in America came to visit us. She looked at me, spoke to my mother and said something simple:
Let him come to America. He’ll do well there.
It did not happen.
I was underage, and at that age many decisions still belong to adults.
For years I could have told that scene as a great missed opportunity.
America. Departure. The alternative life. The door that stayed closed.
It is a seductive story because the lives we did not live have an unfair advantage:
they never had time to disappoint us.
We can make them perfect. We choose the neighbourhood, the friends, the lovers, even the soundtrack.
Real life, unfortunately, also insists on Monday morning.
Someone had seen space
My aunt could not know who I would become.
I probably did not know either.
But she had understood something: perhaps I needed space.
Not necessarily America.
Space.
To try. To fail. To change. To become a version of myself I could not yet imagine where I had been born.
It is strange when someone sees possibility in us before we have the language to describe it.
They do not give us the future.
They simply show us that the future does not have to resemble the present.
The duty to know
We often ask something rather absurd of young people: to know already who they are going to be.
What do you want to do? Where will you live? What is your plan? What is the right choice?
As though at seventeen, twenty or twenty-five we should present a completed life CV.
But experience cannot be invented.
It has to be lived through.
Many of the things we now call character, taste, courage or caution arrived after a series of attempts that looked, at the time, like confusion.
The duty to already be somebody.
The right to become.
This is not an invitation to live without direction.
It means accepting that direction can appear while we are moving.
A place does not save you
For years I associated change with leaving.
Elsewhere looked like freedom.
Sometimes it is.
A new city, country, language or set of people can give us space we did not have.
But no city hands us an improved version of ourselves together with the keys.
A place can help us. Provoke us. Free us from a gaze we had grown too accustomed to.
But sooner or later, permission to become something else has to come from us.
I did not go to America at seventeen.
But the idea that I could belong somewhere else had already entered the room.
It never really left.
We do not owe loyalty to an imagined life
There is a trap inside possibility too.
We can fall so deeply in love with who we might have been that it becomes another duty.
I should have left. I should have chosen differently. If I had done that, today I would be…
We do not know.
The alternative past is a very generous screenwriter. It nearly always cuts the bad scenes.
Perhaps that life would have been extraordinary.
Perhaps I would have come back after six months complaining about the coffee.
What I do know is that I do not owe loyalty even to the dream of that seventeen-year-old.
We have the right to change our dreams too.
A desire can have been true then and no longer be true now.
Not everything we leave behind was false.
Sometimes it simply finished its work.
That life did not happen
The American life of my seventeen-year-old self did not happen.
I no longer consider that a defeat.
Perhaps its job was not to happen.
Perhaps its job was to show me that there was an elsewhere.
That the geography I was born into was not the boundary of the person I could become.
Perhaps becoming an adult does not mean finally knowing who we will be.
Perhaps it means something less reassuring and much freer:
knowing that we can still become.
And then the question is no longer only which life we did not live.
Which version of yourself do you still mourn only because it never had the chance to disappoint you?