I often think to myself how lucky I am to live in a neighborhood where I can take so many different roads to get home. When I lived in Michigan, in a car-centric town, variety on the way home wasn’t ever an option—I may be able to attribute that to a constant reliance on Google Maps to get where I was going. When you’re on foot, things are different. The sprawl that extends outside of Thompson and Spring is slowly becoming more familiar, I myself becoming more of a local.

I find myself mentally raving about these options often. These roads offer me a break in what might be an otherwise mundane act of returning home. If I find myself in the West Village, I can choose between contemplative and quaint old Bedford or a cortisol-peaking walk down 7th Ave where the fear of getting run over by some Hyundai SUV occupies the mind at length.

In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath metaphors her life to a fig tree:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

The Bell Jar was a book I read at the best/worst time possible—the summer into my senior year of college, spent in Washington, D.C. This was a period of profound loneliness, for I knew nobody in the city, and felt that nobody there could truly know me. In the months prior, I grappled with the residue of sexual trauma and the horror of finding out a close friend of mine had taken her own life. Reading Plath’s novel felt like consulting a sage who had looked in a crystal ball, prophesying about my mental and emotional state for the next year. I found myself in total and constant agreement with her perspective and attitude towards the utterly banal world around her. At the time, towards the tail end of the most mundane corporate summer internship I’d truly ever had the displeasure of doing, I had started studying to take the LSAT in an effort to give my life some purpose and to appease the passed on aspiration of my immigrant father.

On a typical day, I’d leave my gentrified apartment complex in search of a coffee shop, and then explore a little bit of a neighborhood I’d never seen before. Regardless of the area, my path followed a similar structure—an espresso, a pastry, then, a walk to a bookstore, where I’d buy a book I was certain I would never read yet convinced myself that the inverse would be true. I’d then return home, plunk through some Khan Academy course, take a practice LSAT, and have dinner. In the evenings, I picked up a book and attempted to read through as many pages as possible before passing out in my chair.

This was my routine. My paths changed, the outcome always the same. Sometimes my practice scores improved, other times they shocked me beyond comprehension. Sometimes I bought a bundle of yellow flowers to commemorate my late friend, other times I didn’t. These are small choices—buying some alstroemerias will never correlate to my ability to become an Olympic swimmer or a renowned biophysicist (for one, alstroemerias will never teach me how to swim nor the essence of molecular biology). I do believe that one’s life is just a series of small decisions that somehow connect into the retrospective path that becomes The Big Picture. A decision to impulsively go on a date with some girl I once knew could simply be one date, where she returns to being a girl I once knew, or it could be the next year of my life. I don’t know if one ever consciously makes the decision to become something.

Despite that, I look around and notice people who have chosen their figs. These are people who, perhaps in early adolescence, kicked their legs out from under their sheets in the morning, prepared a drip coffee, and boldly exclaimed, “From here on out, I will be this!” That’s obviously farcical, but I can’t help, in moments of anxiety and  unassuredness, think to myself that this is just how the rest of the world does it. I writhed in my bed today, finally rising at the sordid hour of 11am, the sun cooking me like a lamb roast, begging me to start my soon-to-be-afternoon and accomplish something meaningful. All the while, I found myself in an anxiously comparative state, wondering why I hadn’t woken up a famous actor, director, writer, gallery artist, designer, or a combination of them all.

My parents will send me a box of Turkish figs from time to time—they’re delightful. Dried and not excruciatingly sweet, tender and soft. The figs are ornately arranged within a plywood box covered in plastic wrap, so you can bear witness the quality of the fig before you dig in. A bit of twine wraps around the stem of each fig, making for a conga line of figs neatly settled in rows. I can never have a single fig. I’ll have them as breakfast, leaving my door having practically dry swallowed six figs in quick succession. Like Sylvia Plath, I contemplate the fig I’ll eat, the person I’ll become. But instead of a paralysis leading to inaction, I eat a lot of figs, hoping to have it all, to be all of the above without missing a thing. However, these are dried figs, impossible to compare to the stately ceremony of eating the fresh fruit, which are ripe for fractions of a moment, fickle and delicate.

When I walk home, I tell myself that I’m keeping myself agile, mentally fit, unafraid of change, when I choose a new and unexplored route. The obvious logical problem here is that I always end up in the same place. My apartment is in the same place each time. I look around at all the different paths I have or could have taken, and yet I always end up here. It feels futile to pick a path home. I do so for aesthetic reasons, so I can enjoy the walk a little more, or for practical purposes if I’m running late. Ultimately, the choices I make wind up immaterial. There is no long term difference, all roads lead to home.

I recently read an essay about randomness by Elisa Gabbert. She writes that “it’s too hard to live when you believe you can see how the rest of your life will play out.” Gabbert states this as a reflection of her middle age, hitting her forties and realizing that the blankness of youth is ultimately lost to a predictable end. This is why she values randomness, and good change, because it keeps her future blank and unpredictable. It echoes the energy of her youth.

I’m not certain that blankness is ultimately the most desirable aspect of youth. I’m also not convinced that knowing exactly what fig to eat is the right way to live, either. I hold these two contradictory sentiments in my head perpetually. The first, that I wish to know what lies ahead in my future, what it is I want to do or become, so that I might fixate on becoming it. The second, that not knowing exactly what I want is a far more pleasurable manner to live, as it means that I cannot predict what might happen, and that my lived experience will truly be different from a previously lived life. Is my desire to be a famous director the result of watching really good movies that already exist? Yes, it’s very likely. 

The thought of taking a path with an obvious next step frightens me because life seems rote if predictable, and it means alienating all other options, watching all other figs rot. Yet, I’m not sure if I feel entirely capable of becoming something when I don’t know what the next step ought to be, and I wholeheartedly wish that I was decisive enough to choose. It’s a cyclical fear. 

I continue to trod down the roads that bring me the most joy, ultimately. Bedford has plants plenty and a serenity to it that 7th lacks. I still know where I’m going, but at times, I get lost along the way, stopping into a plant store or succumbing to the olfactory sensations of an Aesop. The paths home are infinitely variable despite the location staying the same, and sometimes I know exactly what path I’m taking. Other times, I’m not so sure.