Sometimes, I feel like I am doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing: going to school for an unusual major that will most likely be responsible for many years of unemployment, living in the city that moves me, writing about life and love and how it makes me burn.
But sometimes, I feel like I’m not. I feel like I’m just following the path being taken by millions of other American 19-year-olds.
We start planning our entire lives at the age of 14. We worked hard in high school to get good grades and impress college acceptance committees with transcripts we embellished with every good deed we’d ever done. Once we got into the college of our choice, we graduated, left our friends, and learned beautiful, exciting lessons about ourselves in campus classrooms so far away from home.
In college, we’re supposed to find perspective. Make lifelong friends. Vote. Get active about politics, start worrying about global warming and world hunger. Excel. Graduate. Get a job, a spouse, a family (and all in that order–otherwise, what the hell were they thinking?!).
Sixty years later, after grandchildren, retirement, and nursing homes, die.
Life accomplished.
I started planning my life too early, far before the time I knew anything about what I wanted life to mean to me. I was fifteen when schools started sending me glossy brochures and catalogs bearing the faces and stories of yuppy college kids wrapped head-to-toe in their school’s colors, making promises of success and money and knowledge, making me think that I would only find happiness if I lived my life with the exact same plans of all those students in those shiny pictures.
I made plans. Wrote them down, actually. And if everything goes accordingly, I’ll have the rest of my life decided for me within the next 5 or 6 years.
THE PLAN:
1. Graduate in less than 4 years.
2. Meet the man I’ll marry by the time I’m 22.
3. Marry after graduation, or no less than 6 years from now.
4. Have kids within the next 7 or 8 years.
5. Establish a career, go to graduate school, write two novels, all before I’m 30.
I actually wrote this down, thought this out, and convinced myself I wanted this. And I panic, sometimes, thinking about what would happen if my plans failed. If I’m not engaged until 30, I never go to graduate school, and that book deal isn’t signed until I’m 40.
But sometimes, in the middle of this flying crashing anxiety, I wonder if maybe the most beautiful thing that could ever happen to me would be if none of these things went as planned, if it all failed and flopped and fell in a heap of forgotten dreams.
Maybe, maybe, that’s where I’d finally find life.
The rain outside is tapping, tapping, tapping my window, and it’s evoking a lot of strange desires and needs in me. Makes me want to write about it:
It sounds wet and warm and slick, and I sort of wish I was out in it all. Hair dripping wet, slapping my eyeballs. Drops curling like a necklace around my skin, down to all the soft places only my fingers feel. Teeth bouncing dancing chat-chat-chattering with cold. Warm shivers creeping like spiders on my arms. Cold lips, warm breaths, white clouds in the yellow street lamp light.
…I’ve been sad, lately.
Feels like I’ve been getting rained on, but really, I’m keeping quite dry. In fact, I AM happy. Maybe, all this year, I’ve been enjoying a BIG sort of happy, and I used it all up so now, I’ve just got this small happy to deal with. Like when, all your life, you eat the same Jell-O. And you eat a lot of it. Too much, actually, and you eat the Jell-O company out of business, and…you know, actually, no, the example I was going to use is not at all the same thing. Never mind.
Quite simply, I’m just not used to NOT being completely and ridiculously and deliriously happy.
For those of you reading this, I hope you don’t think you don’t make me happy. You do. My LAST wish is that this post of mine will make you feel inadequate as a companion and friend.
I’m just…indescribable. There really isn’t a word for that place between happy and complacent, is there? Maybe…mediocre? Satisfied? Fulfilled?
No…no, none of those work.
I think, maybe, I’m just…here, in that gray little place between happy and not-so-happy, that place that confuses feelings and jumbles thoughts and wrecks words.
All this from the rain, tapping, tapping, tapping still…
I’ve always been a sucker for love.
(Oh, I should mention–this one’s for you, Shaun.)
A hopeless romantic. A hapless sap, whatever you want to call it, that’s me. My parents tell me it’s because I was born on Valentine’s Day. While this may be a valid argument, I’ve always considered my birthday cruelly ironic: until six and a half months ago, I was pretty unlucky in love. Now, I’d like to say my lack of action in the lurrrrve department had everything to do with the intellectual inadequacy of the hormone-crazed high school boys that made up the pool from which I had to fish, so to say.
But probably, I was just a bad fisherwoman.
Most definitely, in the ways of dating, I was a bit of a catch-and-release type of girl. Nothing ever stayed hooked.
And, okay, I was picky.
REALLY picky.
Picky to the point that at the beginning of my senior year, people started catching onto my pickiness. A few of my male friends, determined to discover just who, and what, framed my perfect man, decided that I would settle for nothing less than a “guitar-playing Jesus.”
They thought this was hilarious.
I, on the other hand, realized, with not a little bit of horror, that they were absolutely correct.
But, that didn’t stop me from refusing to pursue any likely bachelors, or discouraging anyone who dared come close, just because they didn’t seem good enough. That’s why I spent nearly all of my four years of high school in a self-induced lonely stupor, whining about my lack of love and deserving every single minute of depressing desperation that came as a result.
And then, six months ago arrived.
That’s when I realized the man I thought I wanted wasn’t at all who I needed. (How’s that for The Cliche of the Day?)
I didn’t need a boy who could pluck from his guitar soulful songs full of sweet nothings he wrote just for me.
I didn’t need a boy who could quote scriptures that even I couldn’t remember.
I didn’t need a boy who wrote me poems, who read thick novels, who volunteered to help the Starving Children of Africa.
At one time, I wanted all of that. All. And even if I’d gotten it, I probably STILL wouldn’t have been satisfied. I’d go fishing for more.
But thankfully, I learned one night last September that the guy I need most isn’t the smartest I’ve ever met. He doesn’t even play guitar. Instead of Scripture, he likes to crack “That’s what she said,” jokes.
But also, he’s honest. Encouraging. Determined. Creative.
He inspires me without meaning to. He surprises me with his thoughts. He believes all the crazy reaching dreams I have will be my life someday. He loves me–ME, with all my crazy neurotic tendencies and strange needs.
It’s crazy, kids.
It’s love.
