I Don’t Have It All, But I Have Enough for Tonight
It’s a random Tuesday.
I’m sitting on a rooftop in Athens with a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips, a grape Schweppes, and an IQOS that has seen me through more emotional crises than some people. A plane is flying so low overhead that for a second it looks like it’s about to land directly on my head. Somewhere below me, the city keeps moving. Somewhere else, my family is celebrating because today I got a new baby cousin.
And for once, I’m not thinking about what I don’t have.
This is unusual for me.
Most days, my mind is a shopping list of absences. The people who left. The messages that never arrived. The versions of my life that exist only in imagination. The apartment I don’t live in, the city I haven’t moved to, the person who didn’t choose me.
But tonight, something shifted.
Not into gratitude. I think gratitude is overrated. Half the time people use it to silence themselves. Be grateful. It could be worse. Look on the bright side.
No. I don’t have it all. There are still things I want badly enough to lose sleep over.
Yet there’s another feeling sitting beside me on this rooftop.
The feeling that I got a thing.
I can’t explain what that thing is. Maybe nobody can. Some people call it hope. Some call it ambition. Some call it personality. Some call it delusion. Maybe it’s all four.
It’s the feeling that your story isn’t finished yet.
That despite every rejection, every disappointment, every embarrassing moment where you checked someone’s profile far more times than any sane person should, there is still something inside you that refuses to become ordinary.
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A thing.
Not everything. Just a thing.
Enough to make a random Tuesday feel cinematic.
Enough to notice the way a plane cuts through the evening sky.
Enough to realize that while I’m sitting here worrying about my future, a baby somewhere in my family is experiencing his very first day on Earth.
Yesterday, he didn’t exist to me.
Today, he does.
Maybe that’s why life feels so strange. We spend so much time measuring what we lack that we forget how often new things quietly arrive. A cousin. A city. A version of ourselves we haven’t met yet.
The truth is, I don’t have it all.
I don’t have certainty.
I don’t have every dream I’ve ever wanted.
I don’t have every person I’ve ever loved.
But on a rooftop in Athens, watching planes skim the sky and eating chips that are aggressively vinegary, I realized something:
Maybe the goal was never to have it all.
Maybe the goal is to have enough curiosity to stay for the next chapter.
And tonight, for whatever reason, that feels like enough
