Boulevard of broken dreams

published: 2010-06-13

A dinner with women. I was in the same student-society with them. About midway the evening, I started feeling sad. Was it the excessive amount of wine? Was it the fact that fifteen years had passed in a flash? What had remained of our ambitions and dreams? Why did they laugh those ideals off as having been the fickle insanities of youth? Because this is real life, they seemed to be saying, this: the two or three kids, the corporate husband, the car, the talk of houses while the subtext is the prices of those houses, the diseases shared friends have suffered and the moral indignation about neighbours who divorce for having commited the grave crime of adultery.
Not only I fell quiet. Two other women did too. The ones who still had dreams, but feared them being blasted away by life as it apparently is.
But not only dreams, there had been depressions too. The pressure of failure for not passing exams, anorexia, auto-mutilation, panic attacks, shrinks, issues with identity that translated as power-struggles and envy. Maybe they have also disappeared.