Dear A,
It is late April, and I feel as though I am standing at a small but significant threshold. I have a job interview on the 29th, the first to come from weeks of deliberate and selective applications, and I can sense the pressure shaping my days. I find myself preparing carefully, thinking through the kinds of questions they might ask, rehearsing how I might respond, and, if I am honest, worrying that my mind might simply go blank when it matters most. The role is modest, certainly not remarkable in salary or status, yet it carries the weight of a new beginning, and I’m trying to take that seriously without diminishing myself in the process.
What unsettles me, if I am honest, is the money. The salary is around £31,000, which is fine, but when I think about what J could earn, around £125,000 in finance, it shifts something in me. It makes my own starting point feel small, even though I know that’s not a fair way to measure it. I catch myself slipping into that comparison too easily, and it leaves me feeling behind. At the same time, when I step back from that, what I actually want feels much simpler and much more real. I want to save steadily and buy a place of my own. I have £10,000 put aside, which I am proud of, even if it does not feel like enough yet for a deposit. I keep picturing a small house, or even a flat with a bit of green space, somewhere modest but mine.
There’s a house I walk past sometimes where they have built a small place in the garden, tucked in beside the main house, the wood cladding softened and silvered with age. It feels calm and self-contained, and I find myself returning to it in my mind more often than I should. Sometimes I see the owner in her sun hat, gardening, her cat quietly circling her feet and weaving in and out of the plants as she works. She has a white electric car, and I remember once having to stop to let her pull out onto the road, which somehow fixed the whole scene firmly in my mind. I think it’s the simplicity of it that appeals. I imagine what it would be like to live somewhere like that, to have a small space that’s entirely my own. Sometimes I take that thought a step further and wonder about buying a piece of land and building something from the ground up. It feels far away when I think about the numbers, but not impossible, and there is something steadying in that.
And yet, when I follow the thought through properly, it feels impossible. A life with you, even in its most modest form, does not belong to the world I actually inhabit. I see that clearly. And then the questions shift. Would I really be happy in a wooden house at the back of someone’s garden. Could I take care of a cat, keep things going, manage the quiet without turning it into something else in my mind. I don’t know. I build these scenes until they feel almost real, and then I have to step back out of them, deliberately, and return to what is in front of me. The interview. The savings. The life.
My thoughts keep returning to the job, because it is the one thing here that’s immediate. It is an administrative role, and what I feel is a kind of anticipation (edged with uncertainty). I am aware of how easily a role like this could narrow if I let it, how routine can take hold and begin to shape the days without much resistance. What unsettles me is the idea of slipping into repetition unnoticed, of time passing without any real sense of autonomy. And yet, I can see that the life I am working towards depends on its own forms of routine. Saving, building, tending a space, all of that asks for repeated effort. Perhaps the difference is whether it feels chosen. Is that what I need to hold onto? Not to resist the structure of the job, but to move through it deliberately, so that whatever I build, however slowly, feels like something I have made.
A, I am not even sure if you are still here, or if you will ever read this. It may be enough to write, knowing there is a chance you might come across these words. And if you do, perhaps something might rest differently between us.
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