Chapter 7 #2
Noa updated Tes on her less-than-successful job search, and then digressed into the fact that she was now twenty-eight and couldn’t shake the feeling like she had just taken too many steps to count backwards in her life.
She felt like, without even knowing it, she had been making sacrifices for her relationship that she was clearly just ‘comfortable’ in for the past few years and now, with thirty fast approaching, she just felt lost and lacking any sense of direction.
She’d done a lot of thinking over the last forty-eight hours, and Noa couldn’t remember the last time her heart had felt like it beat just for Lucas, a time where she felt head over heels in love with him.
She knew she had once, but had she just been trying to make the pieces fit? Content in a life that was easy and predictable? Had she been scared of starting over and let that fear hold her back?
Yes ! The exasperated voice in her head huffed.
After that epiphany, the realisation that she definitely wasn’t getting any younger, and that she wasn’t where she thought she would be at her age, had hit her like a truck over the past few days.
It seemed any time she picked up her phone, her social media was concentrated with people she once knew who were now either settling down, getting married, having babies, or making big career moves, and she just didn’t know where she fit into it all.
She wasn’t moving forward at all. Since finishing university, she had been in the same editing role in the same city. She wasn’t sure how she wanted her life to look without that.
Was she supposed to have it all together now? Because that’s what her eighteen-year-old self had sat in her bedroom and imagined.
When she thought back to how she had viewed the world back then, she remembered staring at the ‘grown-ups’ around her and wanting to be them.
Feeling in awe of how together their lives were.
Being a teenager and having your life dictated by people around her, she remembered wanting the freedom they had.
But was that an illusion? Because Noa didn’t feel very much like the adult she thought she’d be.
She’d neglected and abandoned her childhood dream of writing in favour of security and what she thought was a guaranteed future, only to end up back at her parent’s, single and fumbling through her twenties.
Recruiting her friend to help her with this felt like the best thing to do, so she continued to tell Tes all about the ‘30 before 30’ list. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it since her breakup, when she’d first realised how much she hadn’t done yet.
She’d written a similar list when she was nineteen, dreaming of the future. She’d been sitting on the pier by the lake, the silhouette of the fells painting the horizon, when Alex sat down beside her.
‘Hey, Trouble, what you got there?’
She startled, her head whipping up to look at him. She’d been so engrossed in her bucket list that she hadn’t even noticed him approach .
‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ she said, moving to close her notebook. But he stopped her, covering her hand with his.
She tried to ignore how much she enjoyed the feel of it.
‘You looked like you were lost in another world. It can’t be nothing.’
There wasn’t a hint of insincerity in his eyes as a warm smile crossed his lips, and Noa believed that he really was interested. For some reason, she’d always felt able to be more vulnerable with Alex than most people, so she handed it over to him.
She watched, feeling suddenly shy as his eyes skimmed the page.
He looked at her like he was seeing every part of her, and she squirmed at how it made her feel.
‘You’re made for greatness, do you know that?’ he stated like it was the simplest of facts.
‘Never stick to the status quo, Noa. Always keep chasing the things that make you happy. You can do everything on this list. Even if some of them might be scary, they’re the things you’ll look back on one day, the times you were brave, and you’ll remember them the most.’
She nodded, but only because the lump in her throat meant she couldn’t form words.
‘Earth to Noa,’ Tes cut through yet another trip down memory lane as she waved her hand back and forth in front of Noa’s face.
‘Sorry, I was miles away. What were you saying?’ Noa said, trying to shake off the remnants of the memory that had wrapped itself around her. He had told her she was meant for greatness, that she could do everything she dreamed of doing, and she wanted that to be true .
‘I want to… stop feeling like a bystander in my own life and make things happen for a change,’ she said, only half meaning to say it out loud. Tes looked like she wanted to burst with excitement at Noa’s revelation.
‘Well, that’s easy then, isn’t it,’ she stated. At Noa’s confused face, she continued, ‘That’s your answer. That’s where we start to help you get your spark back. We make that list.’
Noa grinned at how fabulous her friend really is because, yes, that is exactly what she needed.
‘And then, you go and grab life by the labia and get out there, and experience everything on that list.’ Tes paused, and Noa could tell that it was for dramatic effect.
Tes was so confident and self-assured. She had a theatrical flair that would bring a smile to the face of the most sullen person. Noa had always admired that about her.
‘But…’ Tes resumed. Before you go on any more about having your life together at thirty, I think that is an extremely outdated and overrated notion.
I’m all about being happy and living your life to the fullest at thirty, and that’s what this list should be about.
It should in no way reflect what everyone else is doing because that’s just downright boring,’ she said boldly with so much gumption, chugging the remainder of her glass.
With that, the two of them set to work on the list that Noa hoped would help her find some sense of direction, a release in list form of some of the weight that had recently felt so heavy on her shoulders.