Mine: I live in a small cottage in a coastal town and manage a cute cafe.
This leaves me with enough time to write an amazing novel. The novel doesn’t really stand up to western canon, but it satisfies my own pretentious terms.
Which are? Basically, since I was young it has seemed like I perceive the natural world differently. (This is going to be insufferably pretentious.) Pretty much, I feel bombarded by beauty all the time. Things like air humidity, the slant of sunlight, individual leaves on trees, cloud patterns, reflections on pavement… I notice everything all the time, and it’s so beautiful that it almost hurts. But? Nobody I know ever talks about stuff like this, which leads me to believe that I’m alone in feeling this way.
But??? certain favorite poets and authors of mine seem to know about it, too. Walt Whitman, with his endless empathy for everyone, seems to know about it. Emily Dickinson, in “a liquor never brewed;” I think she has seen things this way. Conrad Aiken sees the cosmic in the mundane in “A Morning song for Senlin;” I’m certain that he knows.
So my daydream is to translate the sensory bombardment that I feel into a piece of writing that anyone can relate to. So that maybe in the future, someone will read it and think, “there was a kindred spirit.”
Yeah, like I said, pretentious as shit. But that’s what I really, really want.