Fearful Thoughts of the Near Future

Where do I see myself in ten years time? It’s a sensible, oft’ asked question, one with many possible answers for a single individual.
The pessimist in me answers, married, with kids and a mortgage. Carrying on in the grand old tradition of my ancestors. Working some thankless job, one more slave to the wage, just scraping by, a drudge with nothing to show for it at the end of my days.
I’d like to think, that should life be kind. Part of me hopes -foolishly no doubt- that the past four years have thrown at me the worst of all the hardships I shall ever have to endure in my small insignificant life and that I will be free to accomplish all that I desire.
To travel, to see the world, to carve out some small slice of happiness which, frankly, I think I deserve.
Perhaps I’d own my own business, if I was lucky. I’d own a bakery maybe, it would suit me well, the nocturnal hours in which a baker needs to create his goods suits a life long insomniac to a tee. Maybe I’d own a pretty house filled with memories from years of travel. Maybe all my nagging would have payed off and I would actually have found somebody to build me a house. Perhaps I might even share my life with someone who I wouldn’t feel the constant need to have to explain myself too. I don’t imagine myself to be married with kids -which seems to be most peoples answer to such a question- or rather I hope I’m not. Ten years isn’t really a long time and I’m still something of a child-woman, everyone things I’m grown but i’m really just little, how could I ever adequately care for another human being when I’m still of the opinion that our parents are only put on this earth to fuck us up? Maybe I’ll do as I’ve always threatened and run away to France and live a life of decadence with some hideously inappropriate man who will bring me naught but unhappiness in the end?
Thinking to much about the future fills me both with an intense longing and a gut wrenching fear. I should be thankfull that my life is not mapped out meticously for me by another, that I am not trapped by my own past choices. The future is unknown. How can I know how my future will pan out if I don’t even know myself?
Perhaps in ten years I will. Perhaps not. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
It is things like this that cause Yvonne -an intensely logical and sensible German friend of my acquaintance- to slap my arm and yell at me for thinking too much.
“Your gonna miss what’s in front of you, if you keep thinking too much about the future”.

But then again, I’ve always been far too stubborn to take advice…