Funny How Time Slips By

I was a child, and didn't have a best friend yet. So I learned to read...and we went everywhere together. I learned to write...and took others with me. The plowhorse had his day, but my lullaby still led it to slumber.

She came in the 6th grade, my rival, my best friend...separately and together we charted the teen waters. When she moved across the country the summer before our senior year, my heart broke. I couldn't fathom life without her. But with baby steps, I found my path - out of high school, out of the neighborhood, and learned to swim in the deep end. I didn't know it then, but adulthood was still miles ahead.

That year was my milestone. I couldn't see it but I was coming into my own, drawing people to me, and beginning to find and choose my lifelong friends. Wannabe rebel who couldn't quite shake the goody-two-shoes mantle. Enthusiasm carried the day. Not one, but two Musketeerships - one of the guys, and not believing even decades later I was really anything more. I'm that same girl now...gift and curse of middle age.

With Age

There are riches I didn't treasure enough when they were new, and those I treasure more that they are old, and the ones I was afraid of losing - that I lost. I keep them still, if only in hope and dream and endless memory.

Second Sight

It's abundantly clear you have great happiness. Would I have made you as happy? Could I? We can never know, much as we might like to think so.

I can fall on convention and say, as I did, that you've got the life you have now, that you so love now, because of all the things - including me - that have gone before. Whether it's absolutely true, that too, we can never know for sure.

What we know for sure is you did deserve better than what I did. And what I've learned...slowly and painfully...is that I deserve to have happiness too. But I've also learned that as much as we "create" our own lives, I can't just snap my fingers and tell the wizard to conjure me up a soulmate. Would that I could.

Until I stumble over him on the road to wherever it is I'm going, I'll be grateful for the love of friends, the joys of family, and the hope of having time enough to be forgiven and get it right someday.

It's Time To Do Something About It

I was just a kid, in grownups' clothing, masquerading as someone who knew what she was doing. It took decades to realize we're all impostors of a sort, playing at becoming adults, trying on one costume after another until we figure out who we were all along. Only now it's the end of the 5th decade, and I realize I still feel like the kid trying on Dad's uniform shirt and hat and knowing they'll never fit me.

I had knowledge, but never owned the hard-won wisdom. I had love, but disavowed my worthiness to receive it. I'm told I had beauty, but never believed it, choosing instead to hear the one voice that told me different. How old did I think I'd have to be to claim I could be deserving of such riches?

I have a decent job making a decent salary. Not as much as most make in the same job with the same skills and experience in this market niche in this part of the country - but more than a great many people in these crazy scary economic times.

I try to keep a balance between frugal and reclusive. My financial situation is on its way to feeling more stable than it has in decades, but I don't own a home, and a layoff now would be a catastrophe.

I'm single; have been for a long time now. I don't really want to be, but it's difficult to just "go out and find someone" or even to just "go out and let myself be found."

These are the three foundations of my "current status" tripod, which I'm wobbling atop while swiveling my head madly, because I'm convinced I can't choose between Door #1, Door #2, and Door #3 unless I can see them from here. Equally convinced that seeing the door will give some clue as to what's behind it. Sure that Doors 4-99 will reveal themselves the very second I've committed to choosing 1, 2 or 3. Knowing that some choices lock certain doors behind us (it's true...but needs an essay of its own to describe in any detail), I hesitate ridiculously long to make this one. Why does it seem so important this time? Because of my age? Because of the times? Because I really want to take solid action toward the kind of life I want and not just settle for what I get? Because I've learned the difference between what I can change, and what changes me? Because I'm afraid it's easier to choose what makes us comfortable rather than reach for something new?

Deferral has not served me well. I have been lucky and I have been strong. But I have let fear and doubt chart too many of my routes. The path is longer than I imagined, but still speeds beneath my feet. I won't reach the end wishing for one more day to work harder for one more paycheck.

Some say "no regrets" but I maintain no such pretense. I have the same regrets I've carried all along. All unchangeable, but most diffused through the lense of time. Those that still burn do so with an intensity that only deepens beneath that same lense. Pain continually invents new ways to burrow deep, to best the thresholds previously thought unscalable.

With fierce naivete, I bound myself to the stake of principle until, blackened to my knees, I fell to them in defeat. When I could rise again, I learned to step lightly again from day to day, running headlong into the face of every wind. You can't drop the baggage, but you can practice and learn to carry it without dragging down.

I learned to circle the track. But I'm a road racer...give me top down, tunes blasting, and long back roads every time. Give me at journey's end someone to love, to share the moments high and low. "Wrap me in colors to keep me warm."

Make more time for living. Start living. More.