Take a chainsaw to our future plans

There we stood, you and I, in the rectangle of lawn, blinking up at our future plans which stretched infinitely out above us. You, with a chainsaw hanging from your fists; me holding garden shears, twitching, overwhelmed.

Our future plans had been left to grow unhindered, and now branches forked and sprouted in confident fractals. For quite some time now, I had known that I had to do something about them. Birds were nesting in them. One branch of future possibility (the idea of working abroad for a year) almost reached the side of my house. It could cause structural damage and invite squirrels, you said.

We set to work. You tied the ladder to the trunk of our future plans, and then lodged yourself amidst the branches. I climbed the ladder to pass you the chainsaw, and then stood back to watch your artistry. One by one the boughs of our future plans fell to the ground: plans to write, plans to emigrate, plans for our children dropped and covered the rectangle of lawn. A sawdust of ideas never dreamt snowed down over my head and garden furniture.

When we reached the branch that contained my gap-year plans we paused to take stock of the situation. The branch was pointing in the wrong direction. Whichever way it was cut, it was going to fall towards the house. We didn’t have a rope that we could use to direct the fall, so we came up with a plan: as you sawed the branch, I would push against it using a ladder with all my might, therefore encouraging the branch in the right direction. It was worth a try: you sawed, I pushed. Nothing.

So you sawed a little more. This time, the future plan creaked and I began to feel the force of it looming down above me, threatening to fall. It was at this point that I spotted the flaw in our plan.
‘It’s leaning towards me.’
‘Push back. Harder.’
‘I can’t.’
‘OK,’ you paused momentarily, reviewing our options, ‘I think that you need to put the ladder down, carefully, and run away.’ Unquestioningly, I did as I was told. As I ran, my future plan crashed down behind me, mauling my TV aerial threateningly as it went. So it went on, all through the afternoon. Sometimes the plans fell in my garden, sometimes they fell over the neighbours' fence, and I would retrieve them. Eventually, you climbed back down the ladders, and we stood once again, you and I, looking up at our future plans, now trimmed back to much more manageable trunks. I felt relieved, but still you sought to reassure me: ‘They’ll grow back.’
‘I know.’
Our focus then shifted down to the ground where the now amputated plans lay in random, angular, bifurcated piles as deep as our hips. Neither of us spoke, but clearly the thought occurred to us at the same moment: ‘What are we gonna do with all this stuff?’