Chapter 1
Scarlett
Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. Pictures of men on Tinder are so predictable.
Man holding a fish, looking for a loving adventurous woman.
Guy with muscles and shirt off in the gym mirror, looking for a good time.
Hot guy in a suit with a boutonniere in his pocket, looking for a second family because he is most certainly married. Or best case scenario–freshly divorced.
I sigh and throw my phone down next to me on the bed. It isn’t like I’m searching for a husband, some little kids, and a picket white fence. But I have to admit that I am looking for… something other than this.
When I signed the lease on this apartment I felt like I had made it.
Not only did I land the job of my dreams straight out of college but it wasn’t long after that when I found this apartment.
It’s on the twentieth floor of an extremely popular high rise complex in the middle of Denver.
My living room is full of floor to ceiling windows that look over the mile high city with the Rocky Mountains in the distance.
The entire apartment is clean lines and very modern.
It’s exactly what I thought I wanted when I moved in.
The longer I live here though, the more I notice how empty it feels.
The grey tiled floor was something I fell in love with when I first walked it.
Now it just feels cold. I’ve put up as many pictures as I can of me and my girls but most of the walls are bare.
Without another person living here there’s never any form of life and I’m too busy and gone too much for a pet.
So I scroll. Not only on social media but on apps like Tinder, trying to find some sort of connection through the screen of my phone.
Only problem is I’ll make a connection, we’ll start texting, it will seem to be going well, and then when I can’t be as available as they think I should be it fizzles out.
I don’t know if it’s just a by-product of getting older or if I really am just unhappy in my life but there’s this void inside me. One that doesn’t seem like it can be filled by doom scrolling and swiping on Tinder. So I pick my phone back up and this time I open Zillow.
Yep, my guilty pleasure is searching up farmhouses and dreaming about what I would do if I had the opportunity to be somewhat off grid.
Now I’m not talking about solar panels and outhouses, although the more I live in this city the more I wonder if that could be appealing.
I’m just thinking of a few acres of land with a little house that’s maybe old and full of quirks.
I’d get some chickens, a couple goats, maybe a few of those big fluffy dogs that are bred to protect the herd.
Get back to the days of making food from scratch and knowing that my vegetables came from the dirt right outside my home.
Less preservatives in my food and more preserving my soul.
After a few minutes of dreaming about that life I open up TikTok and take a short video.
Switching to the front facing camera, I take in my appearance, take my hair out of the clip it’s been in all day and let it fall around my face.
I still have makeup on from work and I admit that it’s not a half bad sight.
I push record and put on the smile that my followers are used to seeing.
“Hey guys, do you ever think of just completely changing your life? I don’t mean cutting bangs, I mean like quitting your job and moving out of the city and just completely uprooting everything you know?
If you did, what would you do?” I watch the video over again, and once I’m satisfied with the vibe I add in the captions and hit post. Getting a bunch of followers on social media was never something I set out to do.
It started as another outlet for the creative journalism side of me.
When work started to become more work and less a passion for the stories, I started posting online about things I thought mattered.
Things that felt important to me but I couldn’t write about in the magazine.
Somewhere along the lines, it resonated with other people too and I gained traction on all the typical platforms. For the last year I’ve been bringing in more and more money from views on my posts as well as ads of products I’d post about.
I just thought it would be a fun little addition to my salary but lately, it’s almost consistently more than my salary.
The next morning I wake up to comments agreeing with my publicly vulnerable moment from last night.
“I have always wanted to be an author, but someone told me once that it wasn’t something I could make money on so I got a job in finance instead. Everyday I wish I would have tried anyway.”
“If I could change my life I would go back to school to be a social worker. I thought that I was doing the right thing becoming a teacher, and while I love these kids that I teach… I see so many of them slipping through the cracks and I wish I was in a position to do more.”
“I would be a singer if I had the chance.”
“I wish I hadn’t let someone tell me I was too overweight to be a dancer. Moving my body is the only thing that makes me feel like I’m alive. I don’t even need to do it professionally, I just wish I had more courage to do it with other people.”
The list of responses went on and on. The longer I read all these dreams that aren’t being lived the more I feel this deep burning in my gut.
Every week I get the “Sunday scaries” because I don’t like what I’m doing in my life anymore.
There was a time in my life when I woke up before my alarm went off.
I would jump out of bed ready to go to work and do what I dreamed of as a kid.
Because I was that kid that never went anywhere without a notebook and pen in my hand.
When I first landed this job, I thought I had made it. Life could only go up from there.
Now…now I just feel restless every day. There’s no passion for much of anything in life right now.
I’ve been in cruise control for so many years now that I can’t even count them.
I wake up, go to work, write what I’m told to write, come home mentally exhausted and scroll on some sort of app before I go to bed just to wake up and do it all over again.
Guilt overtakes me as I think about all these people not living their dreams. I am living the life that was once my dream. But, is it okay to let dreams change?