All the Cities I’ll Never Wake Up In

The hardest part of being alive isn’t heartbreak, or the creeping dread that finds you in the quiet moments, or even the absurdity of trying to budget for Wi-Fi and overpriced oat milk lattes.

It’s the aching, inescapable truth that you only get one life. Just one. And if you’re anything like me, that feels impossibly, unbearably unfair.

Because how do you live fully when there are too many ways to live? How do you choose one path, one story, when every decision is a door closing on a hundred other possibilities? I don’t want to be just one thing—I want to be everything. I want to live in a tiny Parisian studio, surrounded by books I’ll never finish reading. I want to be a florist who rises at dawn, my hands always smelling faintly of lavender and earth. I want to run a café where strangers leave as friends, where the coffee is strong, and the Wi-Fi is blissfully free. I want to make movies that live in people’s hearts forever and write books that haunt them long after the last page.

I want to live a thousand lives, and yet I only get this one.

It’s a quiet kind of grief; mourning the lives you’ll never get to live, the people you’ll never get to be. I often think about Sylvia Plath’s fig tree, those branches heavy with every life she could imagine: the wife, the mother, the writer, the adventurer. She sat beneath it, starving, unable to choose, as the figs withered and fell. That image stays with me, like a bruise you press just to feel the ache again.

And here’s the thing—this isn’t about ambition. It’s not about climbing ladders or making a name for yourself. It’s hunger. For every book you’ll never read, every language you’ll never learn, every city you’ll never wake up in. It’s standing in a bookstore and realizing you’ll die before you finish every novel that catches your eye. It’s scrolling through movies and knowing you won’t have enough time to see all the ones that matter. It’s the crushing weight of wanting.

As kids, we’re fed this beautiful lie: You can be anything you want. But no one mentions the fine print. You can be anything, sure, but not everything. And every choice you make means sacrificing all the others. Go left, and you’ll never know what was waiting for you on the right. The older you get, the more you feel it. Every yes to one thing is a no to something else.

I envy people who seem so certain of who they are. The ones who knew at five years old they’d grow up to be doctors or writers or teachers, who chased one dream without looking back. I imagine they move through life without the constant hum of what if? in the back of their minds. For the rest of us—for those of us who dream in too many directions—every decision feels like a betrayal.

But maybe this ache, this longing to be so much more than we can ever be, is the thing that makes life beautiful. Maybe it’s not about choosing the perfect path but about weaving all the pieces of ourselves into the life we have. I may never be the filmmaker I dreamed of being, but I can still carry a camera with me, capturing moments that feel like tiny miracles. I may never settle down in a Parisian flat, but I can fill my kitchen with flowers and French records, turning Sunday mornings into something that feels close enough.

Life doesn’t have to be linear. It doesn’t have to fit into a neat five-year plan. You can zigzag. You can gather pieces of all the lives you wanted and carry them with you. You can be the writer who paints, the teacher who writes songs, the accountant who dreams of gardens.

I’ll never be all the people I want to be. But as I walk through this messy, glorious life, I’ll carry them with me: the poet, the florist, the dreamer, the diplomat, the teacher, the filmmaker. They’ll be in my bookshelves and the music I play, in the photographs I take and the flowers I grow.

I’ll keep them in my pockets, these figs from Sylvia’s tree, a little piece of every life I longed for.

Wherever I go, whoever I become, I like to believe all the versions of me scattered across the universe are quietly rooting for me, sending me love.