I want to sit in a bar and drink red wine and eat a slice of bread with salted butter smeared across it. I want to wear that off-the-shoulder black gown for the hell of it, tumble onto the streets in it, make out in an alleyway with it clinging to my skin. I want to pull taper candles out of a pot of raw beeswax and sculpt lampshades with paper mache. I want to romanticise friendship more and solitude less.

I want to stop bad sex halfway through and say something like ‘go and read a book about female pleasure’ and wave them away with a flick of the wrist. I want to knit all of the children in my life jumpers – pullovers and cable knits with buttons in the shape of dogs. I want to write a graphic novel and find an agent for my book and open the canned pears I’ve been saving for a ‘special time’. I want more hangouts, less catch-ups. More time in my parents’ garden, less on my phone. I want to write more birthday cards, print more photos and write more stories about the people I love. I want to reclaim my skin, cover it in tattoos, ink it with the symbols of strength I find in my dreams. The tree. The golden thread. The flowers.

I want to lean into the panic attacks that arrive mid-intimacy, let my body scream and cry and shake and grieve without apology (I am full of rage, you must understand). I want more community care, less ‘self-care’. More eye contact, less quick fucks. I want to foster ritual with the women in my life, with late night beach fires and candle burning and spit handshakes. I want to swim two kilometres, ride a hundred and handstand for a minute before my 30th birthday. I want to worry less about my ‘body clock’ or my fluctuating weight or that time a man told me I had a good body but ‘it’s a shame about her face’. I want to listen to more albums in full, less Spotify Radio. More birds outside, less Reels in bed.

I want to sit in the cinema alone and watch a film that makes me cry. I want to sunscreen every morning and moisterise every night. I want to pull tarot cards and read the Book of Psalms and nurture a soft spirituality that feels private and true. I want decolonise to be a verb, not a throwaway platitude. For my political views to be informed by longform media, not screenshots on Instagram. I want more nuance, less divisiveness. More joy, more dancing, more crying. Less dating apps, less curation, less expectation.

Most of all, I want to make myself softer. To lean into that vulnerable kind of love that blossoms in the garden where you have everything to lose and everything to gain.