I envy the girl who chews on the end of her ballpoint pen. The one in the plaid skirt with the vintage Mary Janes that she considers her sneakers as she clicks through the stone streets. She sits in front of the works of Picasso, van Gogh, and the stolen pieces of history displayed throughout Europe, contemplating the nature of colonialism's effects while others meander through the exhibits, mostly using the museum as refuge from the always surprisingly hot nature of European summers.

She collects sweat at the nape of her neck as she scribbles doodles, lines of poetry, and observations into a leather-bound notebook. She wonders about the streets with a cardigan gifted from her mother, a canvas bag that is worn from travel. She reinforces the backpack straps on the train, ignoring the obsessively annotated copy of a book by an author she can barely pronounce. On the train, she thinks about her childhood pet. The one she left behind to tour Europe with the money provided by her fellowship's financial support. The fellowship she got while studying abroad, again.

She doesn't think about her parents much, or her friends, or the people left behind. She only thinks about moving forward, unsure of where she is going except for the destination of her next train ticket.

She rides trains. I envy that she rides in trains.

Oh, and . . . she's not thinking about someone like me. Instead, she thinks of her cat, how old it is, how at any point it could die and she won't be there. Despite this depressing thought, she moves forward. Unburdened by the millions of things happening at home. Maybe it was the unconventional nature of her home life that really got her there. The thousands of things she could have written about including her struggles as a white middle class woman, the type of struggles that star Dana Ivey and Robert Klein from Two Weeks Notice as her parents. She could write about her cat dying, about the unforgiving attitude of Europeans when she claims herself as an American, about the one caryatid and how her distance from her sisters represents a modern disconnect between women, how she came up with all these ideas while taking the train from Germany to Paris.

She could write about how she continues moving forward, how she worries about stretching her scholarship across Europe, making it back to London, missing the train, and not getting a student discount at the art museum.

Like me, she worries about the state of the world. Living with one foot in the past and one in the present, always hyper aware of the steps that led us here and the steps to come. Still, she pushes forward.

She isn't held back by the confines of her state, of her worries for the future. I envy her ability to easily pack up and leave, to never consider coming back home, to think of her cat dying and to only think how sad i wasn't there and not carry immense amounts of guilt, to cry and then sip coffee at a corner cafe where the waiter speaks only English to her despite her best efforts at conversing in French.

I envy her. Her PhD, her 60s vintage minis, her ability to win at trivia nights, to do all the things I never thought to do.

I can't live in regret, but I can't help but simmer in all the could-have-beens, like my own personal fig tree. Every branch spanning out endlessly. I picture the multiple realities that might have been and might still be. I envy her fig tree, and she envies someone else's and we're all in a perpetual game of comparison. Comparison that stifles our voices, mutes our individuality, and creates clones out of our beings.

We are already all becoming the same. The same style, the same music, the same humor. Carbon copy Instagrams and essays and closets, all beginning to flow in one direction, all to the same conclusions: we envy her.

What's that saying about how comparison kills art?