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. I remember i had just moved into my apartment, a new couch, it 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, asking me to feel something new. I don't feel new. 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, and it does it quietly. I'll be listening to an album on shuffle, a song I swear I've known for years, and I'll scroll down to the credits just to check something, and I'll 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 offseason

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. Some of that might be true. 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 (they are 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 who is 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 realisation is I'm not sure I'm doing the kind of work that would let me know.

The album thing is worse, actually. Because the album didn't change. The song is the same song. The chords are the same chords. If I press play and it still hits, what does that say about me. Either I found a piece of music that is genuinely timeless, which is possible, or I stopped somewhere and the song is just the last thing I picked up before I sat down. I'm not ready to rule out either one. But I'm not ready to feel good about the second one.

Here's what I think the fear actually is, when I peel it back. It's not that nothing changed. Some things changed. I changed in ways I can measure and in ways I can't. The fear is that the rate of change is not mine. That I'm not the one driving the years. That the World Cup is going to keep coming back every four years, and the albums are going to keep being five years old, and I'm going to keep remembering where I was, and the where-I-am is going to keep being close enough to the where-I-was that the difference doesn't justify the time. That is the thing I'm scared of. Not stagnation exactly. Closeness. The feeling that life is happening at a distance I can see but can't close.

I don't have a clean ending for this. I don't want to write one of those essays where the last paragraph reveals that the whole time, the author was actually winning and we just didn't know. I'm not winning. I'm just here, with the same taste, the same salary bracket, the same apartment logic, the same fears, watching a tournament come back around like a relative who visits every few years and notices what you haven't done with the room. And the only thing I can say for sure is that I noticed. I noticed this time. I didn't scroll past it. I sat with it long enough to write it down, which is not growth, but it's not nothing either.

The next World Cup will be here before I'm ready. And I'll watch it. And I'll remember this one.