that have been him, all those years ago? It was scarcely believable.
Yet it became believable. For as he continued to read, he began to see himself, the person he knew himself to be now, emerging. Gradually, over the course of 2000 and 2001, the entries became less and less hopeful, increasingly empty of optimism, until the last ever entry he penned in January 2001:
“January 12th 2001: I’m going to be a solicitor in London.”
He remembered that day well. You never forget the day your dreams finally die and you realise that your fate is to represent the very people you wanted to fight; that your life will be spent brokering corporate deals and writing contracts for faceless multinational empires; perhaps in the end representing the very oppressors you originally wanted to challenge.
That is exactly what Jonathan had become, he realised now. With a jolt and a sick feeling he remembered what his next job was to be. After the completion of the mobile phone deal, he was to draft the contracts for the merger of two giants of the construction world. There was a problem, though: there were squatters in one of the buildings that were going to be transferred in the deal. His nineteen year old self would have joined them in their squat, would have argued that to throw them out is to make them homeless and really, you big corporations are already quite rich, so you don’t exactly need to evict them do you? Yet he was now thirty one and it was his job to make sure the deal went ahead. The squatters were a problem that he would have to solve. And by ‘solve’, he would clearly have to be the one to evict them, or at least to organise their eviction.
Nicky walked in.
“Dinner’s ready,” she announced.
Dinner: the pie had cost £5 from Waitrose; the peas and potatoes also £5. They were expensive, special, luxury items: the peas were hand-picked from the finest British farms; the chicken in the pie had been organically reared and fed on the most nutritious seeds available.
Jonathan was only half-listening. His mind had seemingly flipped, his worldview momentarily transformed and he felt his younger self, his idealistic, hopeful, revolutionary younger self, emerging from the dust in the pit of his stomach. And he was angry. He was angry at what Jonathan had become; angry that he had sold out on his dreams and settled for second best; angry that instead of representing the oppressed, he was now the lacky of the oppressors.
A decision was made in Jonathan’s mind. It was instantaneous, involuntary, and unignorable. The pit in his stomach had exploded on reading his diary and questions flooded through: what would my student self think if he could see me now?, he thought. Would he be proud, or ashamed? He knew the answer, and he didn’t like it. It was screaming at him from his oesophagus as the ghost of his aggrieved youth came up through his body like some malevolent possession.
Yet hope accompanied the pain. His ghost was admonishing him, reminding him of his youthful idealism. He remembered his drive, his energy, his passion, his determination and the one reason he had decided to study law in the first place. The subject had never interested him, but its uses had. He had seen injustice and poverty on the television and in the street, and he had seen the law as a tool he could use to fight it. His life was therefore a failure. He had the well-paid job, the glamorous wife, the expensive car: to the world, he was successful. To himself, though, he was not. He had sold his soul for the sake of cash. He had given up.
So the conclusion said itself: “Tomorrow I’m going to quit my job.”
Nicky was gobsmacked. “What?” she yelled in horror. The tray in her hand crashed to the floor as she dropped it in shock, sending tea spilling all over the carpet.
“I’ve read the diary you found, and it reminded me of who I was. Of who I am. I’m not meant to be this, to be doing this. I’m not meant to be merging and breaking up companies for a living. I have no interest in that. It makes my life soulless, mindless drudgery. Sure, we have money, but look at us! Are we happy? You’re bored, I’m tired; our life is monotonous and just plain wrong.”
His wife didn’t know what to say. She just stood there for a moment, speechless. The two of them had only met five years previously, by which time Jonathan had already invested himself into the corporate career ladder. She had never met this naïve idiot- as she saw it- who was now standing before her.
“You’re rambling,” she said eventually. “And over-thinking. This- this is a mid-life crisis, just a little bit early. What do you want? Go and buy a car or something. That usually does it.”
“Oh, I’m not thinking at all!” he practically shouted. “For once, I’m ready to live! Nicky, think of it: I’ll quit my job and find a new one, at a different firm. It’ll mean a lower salary, sure, but I’ll be doing the work I love. I’ll actually be making a difference to the world, fighting for the rights of the poor and defending the weak from those more powerful than them. Those oppressing them. We only get one life on this planet- why waste it doing something you hate?”
“But- the house! The mortgage! The- money!” she stammered. “Jonathan, this is just selfish!”
“Don’t you see?” he implored her. “None of those things matter. Our life has become so artificial, defined by how much we earn and how much we spend. It’s not how we’re meant to live. It doesn’t make us happy.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” she yelled, before storming out. Yet his mind was made up. He costed everything up in his head:
His job: worth £600,000 a year.
His house: worth £1,000,000, with two years left on the mortgage.
His possessions: he had no idea, but they must have cost him several thousand pounds at least.
His wife: again, he had no idea the exact figure, but she definitely cost him a similar figure.
All of this added up to a hefty sum. Yet he was willing to give it all away because there’s one thing he still had left to consider.
The cost of giving up on his dreams and compromising his one shot at life: priceless.
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