“And you don’t want that?”
“I don’t know what I want,” I say.
From the look on her face, that was the worst thing I could say. She turns away from me and starts walking faster. “Well, you might as well be a doctor, then.”
“What’d I do just now?” I ask, catching up to her.
She waves me off. “It’s your life.”
I feel like I’m close to failing a test. “Well, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A data scientist,” she says, with no hesitation.
I open my mouth to ask WTF, but she fills me in with a practiced speech. I’m not the first person to have WTF’d her career choice.
“Data scientists analyze data, separate the noise from the signal, discern patterns, draw conclusions, and recommend actions based on the results.”
“Are computers involved?”
“Yes, of course,” she says. “There’s a lot of data in this world.”
“That’s so practical. Have you always known what you wanted to be?” It’s hard to keep the envy out of my voice.
She stops walking again. At this rate, we’ll never get where she’s going. “This isn’t destiny. I chose this career. It didn’t choose me. I’m not fated to be a data scientist. There’s a career section in the library at school. I did research on growing fields in the sciences, and ta-da. No fate or destiny involved, just research.”
“So it’s not something you’re passionate about?”
She shrugs and starts walking again. “It suits my personality,” she says.
“Don’t you want to do something you love?”
“Why?” she asks, like she genuinely doesn’t understand the appeal of loving something.
“It’s a long life to spend doing something you’re only meh about,” I insist. We scoot around a combination pretzel/hot dog cart that already has a line. It smells like sauerkraut and mustard (aka heaven).
She wrinkles her nose. “It’s even longer if you spend it chasing dreams that can never, ever come true.”
“Wait,” I say. I put my hand on her arm to slow her down a little. “Who says they can’t come true?”
This earns me a sideways glance. “Please. Do you know how many people want to be actors or writers or rock stars? A lot. Ninety-nine percent of them won’t make it. Zero point nine percent of those left will make barely any money doing it. Only the last zero point one percent make it big. Everybody else just wastes their lives trying to be them.”
“Are you secretly my father?” I ask.
“I sound like a fifty-year-old Korean man?”
“Without the accent.”
“Well, he’s just looking out for you. When you’re a happy doctor making lots of money, you’ll thank him that you didn’t become some starving artist hating your day job and dreaming pointlessly about making it big.”
I wonder if she realizes how passionate she is about not being passionate.
She turns to look at me narrow-eyed. “Please don’t tell me you’re serious about the poetry thing.”
“God forbid,” I say with mock outrage.
We pass by a man holding a sign that says PLEASE HELP. DOWN ON MY LUCK. A cabbie on a mission honks long and loud at another cabbie, also on a mission.
“Are we really supposed to know what we want to do for the rest of our lives at the ripe old age of seventeen?”
“Don’t you want to know?” she asks. She’s definitely not a fan of uncertainty.
“I guess? I wish I could live ten lives at once.”
She waves me off again. “Ugh. You just don’t want to choose.”
“That’s not what I mean. I don’t want to get stuck doing something that doesn’t mean anything to me. This track I’m on? It goes on forever. Yale. Medical school. Residency. Marriage. Children. Retirement. Nursing home. Funeral home. Cemetery.”
Maybe it’s because of the importance of the day, maybe it’s meeting her, but right now it’s crucial to say exactly what I mean.
“We have big, beautiful brains. We invent things that fly. Fly. We write poetry. You probably hate poetry, but it’s hard to argue with ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate’ in terms of sheer beauty. We are capable of big lives. A big history. Why settle? Why choose the practical thing, the mundane thing? We are born to dream and make the things we dream about.”
It all comes out more passionately than I intend, but I mean every word.
Our eyes meet. There’s something between us that wasn’t there a minute ago.
I wait for her to say something flip, but she doesn’t.
The universe stops and waits for us.
She opens her palm and she’s going to take my hand. She’s supposed to take my hand. We’re meant to walk through this world together. I see it in her eyes. We are meant to be. I’m certain of this in a way I’m not certain about anything else.
But she doesn’t take my hand. She walks on.
WE ARE HAVING A MOMENT I don’t want to be having.
When they say the heart wants what it wants, they’re talking about the poetic heart—the heart of love songs and soliloquies, the one that can break as if it were just-formed glass.
They’re not talking about the real heart, the one that only needs healthy foods and aerobic exercise.
But the poetic heart is not to be trusted. It is fickle and will lead you astray. It will tell you that all you need is love and dreams. It will say nothing about food and water and shelter and money. It will tell you that this person, the one in front of you, the one who caught your eye for whatever reason, is the One. And he is. And she is. The One—for right now, until his heart or her heart decides on someone else or something else.