All my friends are married with families, houses, property with fences and garages and houses with washing machines and dryers and refrigerators that don't make screeching noises as you pray it keeps working so all your food doesn't go bad the day after you stocked up on groceries.
And me? I'm working at a job so far below my potential that even my boss can't figure out why I'm there, I'm months behind on my electric bill, my boyfriend lives more than two thousand miles away and I can't get my cat to stop eating my mail. Really. He seems to think the best way for me to pay my bills is after he's chewed off the corners and thrown them back up onto my shoes.
Today was an absolute disaster from start to finish at work and I felt like I let down so many people and I got yelled at by almost everyone one of my coworkers, even the new guy. And the one guy who actually makes me smile and keeps my brain from shrinking into an atrophied state of stupidity for lack of intelligent conversation, I felt like I ruined his day by constantly fucking up, so I faced down my fears of social anxiety and offered to buy him frozen yogurt after work for surviving the day with me. The visit was short-lived, I feel like I said all the wrong things and was this totally awkward bumbling idiot with her head in the clouds and if that weren't enough, as I pulled into the parking lot across from my condo, I picked up my half-finished cup of now-mostly-melted "froyo" and somehow managed to dump it all over myself. I mean all over myself. It's in my hair, it's all over my brand new shirt, all over my very last pair of clean pants, it's in my fucking underwear.
And as I sat there in my car, covered in an ice-cold sticky mess listening to a song about a girl who just wants to escape her small-town nothing life, I couldn't help but laugh. This is my life. This is the lot I've been cast. Some girls were born to grow up into beautiful women, get married, have beautiful families and live happy beautiful lives. I have a friend with that life. Other women were born to be adventurers who see the world, pack up and head to Burning Man without any road maps or plans or obligations, and even the very few single friends I have left still have the "adult" thing down enough to purchase their own homes and new cars.
I spent the first 15 minutes of every morning trying to find my pants and at least twice a week, I have no idea where I parked my car and have an anxiety attack thinking my car has been towed or stolen or abducted by aliens. Nope. I just have attention-deficit disorder and can manage to lose even a giant 2-ton block of metal on wheels.
My life is kind of a pathetic joke; my only real goals are to fall in love and change the world. Society long threw out the last of its residual hippie population and somehow I slipped through the cracks. I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. Ever. I still write love poems no one ever sees, I still make wishes on shooting stars, and I still come home from work every single day with a burning child-like excitement beating through my chest wondering if this might finally be the day I get a love letter in the mail or a random package I wasn't expecting full of some grand surprise that could forever alter the entire course of my life.
But every day it's still the same thing: bills, grocery store fliers, and for some reason, car insurance offers for the guy who moved out of this place 5 years ago. I think I get more mail for him than I do for myself and he only lived here for 6 months before I took over the lease. Life is funny.
But while I was having frozen yogurt with my friend, I got this momentary arcane glimpse into my past when I realized that he's 22 and when I was 22, exactly this week 12 years ago, I was living in a battered women's shelter in a slightly worse financial situation as I am now, and just as lost on what to do with my future. But the thing is, This time around, I can laugh about everything that's going wrong in life. I can laugh, because I have hope. I know this is only temporary. God Almighty knows my deepest fear is that I will never move above this current situation and I will spend the rest of my life scraping to get by, but there's too much evidence suggesting contrary futures to this current lot.
I know I'll never be rich. I hope someday I'll be loved enough to wear a ring and give my life to noble man worthy of my undying devotion and maybe, if I'm lucky, I could have a decent retirement nets egg set aside by the time I'm too old to work. But in between now and then, I'm pretty much always going to be the girl who says awkward things when trying to be social, I will inevitably find 100 more ways to spill ice cream on myself and be forced to walk half a block back to my front door covered in dripping wet white goo from head to toe as my face burns in shame wishing I could explain to all the cars passing me by that it's only ice cream, and nothing in my house will be able to stay clean for more than 24 hours because if I don't knock over or spill something, my cat will surely be right behind me picking up the slack.
But you know, there are far worse lives I could live. I could be sad, I could be mean, I could be bitter and resentful, I could still be suffering from an eating disorder and hating myself for eating frozen yogurt or I could have been too afraid to ask someone to hang out with me and be my friend. And I almost was. At the end of my life, I'll be dead. This is the time that matters. I have sticky ice cream all over my hair. I'll never be beautiful or graceful, but if nothing else, I can always find a reason to smile.
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