The Optimized Cookie

I’ve recently come across a video where a grandchild asked her grandfather “what’s the secret to having long life?”, and straight up he answered, “marry a good woman.” The post continued to show several pictures of when the couple were younger.

I don’t know about you but I’m an absolute sucker for these kinds of things and my tear ducts go haywire at any given opportunity when I watch videos like these.

It makes me want to live my younger years better. It makes me want to take pictures more and look back at them years after they were taken – and given, I’m one of those people that don’t like taking selfies and have less of an artistic eye at taking pictures in general so this is saying something. It makes me want to make lasting memories I can have vague references for when my brain starts to get weak.

I couldn’t help but look in the mirror and take a mental snapshot of what I looked like in that moment, looking youthful with skin still looking as tight as you do as a twenty-something year old, and say to myself how I’ll be looking at pictures of my younger self and get reminded of how far young and decent I looked versus how I’ll be when I’ll be staring at it in the future. Maybe then I’ll stop complaining how horrifically unattractive I feel at present. To think that these will be the very pictures my kids and grandchildren will look at and exclaim, “was this really you back then?”

When I tell stories to them of how I lived my life, I want to look back at it happily and have a laugh at it no matter how hard life had seemed. I want to keep in touch with my dearest friends even when I’m retired, probably asking me if I’d regret not going out more and partying when I had the chance to, or talking about deeper things such as our struggles as corporate slaves or even how we thought we couldn’t survive a global pandemic.

I want to spend time with people I love and feel like I am myself with. I want to give them hugs and get hugs back and be enveloped in an environment where there’s love, understanding, and communication. It’d greatly help give me the least amount of wrinkles I could possibly get.

And when I’m old and someone asks my husband and I what the secret to our long life is, we’d answer with a smile, probably looking far into the distance, our minds floating to when we were younger laughing so hard until our tummies couldn’t take it, taking long night walks and sitting on a park bench telling how happy we were to see each other, exchanging the goofiest, cheesiest jokes you could imagine.

And there you’d have your answer.

Find the right person for you. Find your other whole (or maybe even just find yourself and love it just as much) and the rest would be history.

Thanks for reading!

I enjoyed making this draft, typing it out here, and finally getting to publish it. And while we’re on the topic of finding your better wholes, I’d like to greet mine a happy, happy name day! Today is his special day but the fact of the matter is that he makes every day special simply by existing and he should know that. He brought such color to my life that I’ll forever be thankful for how random the universe is, having successfully conspired two souls on the literal opposite sides of the world to meet. So to my other whole, I hope you continue existing happily and healthily for many more years to come. Sending lots of love and hugs to you.

Xo,

Pigeon