4 years ago

The World Cup is coming back, and the first thing I felt wasn't excitement. It was that strange tilt you get when a date on the calendar hits you before your brain does. I watched this same tournament 4 years ago: 4 ans? Jesus. I remember where I was. New apartment, new couch, a little late because of the time difference with Qatar. All of that is still in my body like muscle memory, and now the same event is here again. I feel like I'm being asked to watch myself from four years ago and notice what changed.

Someone online said you should use the World Cup as a metric to gauge where you are in life. I almost scrolled past it. Then I didn't, because the thought was already in me before I read it. I just hadn't given it a shape.

I do this with two things: the World Cup and music. The World Cup is the obvious one, because it only comes every four years, so the gap is large enough to lie to yourself in. But music does the same thing to me, quietly. I'll be listening to something on shuffle, a song I swear I've known for years, and I'll scroll to the credits and see it was released in 2019. Or 2020. And I will remember exactly where I was. I was running when I listened to Mr. Morale. And The Off-Season.

So the question comes, and it doesn't come gently: is it that my taste hasn't changed, or is it that I haven't?

I want to be careful here, because this is the part where people usually start lying to themselves in paragraphs. They say things like, "growth isn't linear," as if that sentence pays rent. They say, "you're exactly where you need to be," as if the universe has a chart and a stamp. Ça peut être vrai. But most of it is a soft pillow you press against something sharp so you can sleep.

Let me just say what I'm looking at. My salary then and my salary now are not a story I want to tell out loud. The house I was staying in is, in some way, the same house. The problems I was carrying four years ago are the same problems; heavier, wearing a slightly different shirt. I am older. My back hurts in places it didn't used to hurt. The fears I had then, I have not outgrown. I have only settled deeper into them.

That's the part that really gets me. I'm not sitting with the fears of someone five years older than me. I'm sitting with the fears of me, four or five years back.

I think about the next World Cup, four years from now, and I try to picture myself watching it. Where will I be. Will I be proud of the answer, or will I do that thing where I smile and say, "we thank God," and change the subject.

The honest version is I don't know. And the honest, more dangerous realization is that I'm not sure I'm doing the kind of work that would let me know.

But here's what I think happened: it's not that nothing changed. Some things changed. I just changed in ways that are harder to measure than I expected. The rate of it is what gets me; c'est pas ce que je pensais. Anyha, let's see what the next 4 look like.