Life is a challenge. It has way more downs than ups, too many turns to navigate, more conflict, less resolution, and a strange menagerie of scenes that seem like they should belong to someone else, not you.
Let me try and be a little clearer.
It all started last week, when my best friend very happily called to inform me of her engagement. It was three minutes after midnight. I had to get up at five to get ready for work. We talked for an hour and a half.
Can you picture it? There I was, in the yoga pants that I wear far more as pyjama bottoms than actual fitness fashion, a holey magenta top, braless, barefoot, groggy from a weekend of watching the Turner Classic Movie station, with a cell phone held up to my ear as my best friend beams – and I’m talking a ray of sunshine here – about how her boyfriend proposed to her on their trip to Orlando. Considering the circumstances, I did what any best friend would do...I made her tell me the entire proposal story and fluffy afterglow in excruciating detail. I giggled and I smiled until my teeth were sore and I told her how happy I was that she was happy.
Now, my best friend has not had a great year or three, so hearing the absolute joy in her voice really did make my heart hurt. I’ve wanted to hear that gleefulness in her words again for a long time.
We talked until after one. We had a final round of giggles and congratulations before we said goodnight and hung up. If I had fallen asleep right then, I would have been able to clock almost four hours of sleep. I took off my glasses, got under the sheets, turned off the lamp, stared at the ceiling...and cried.
And I’m not talking a lonely teardrop à la Cry Baby cry, I mean near howling, runny nose, rivers of tears, blotchy faced, keening wail, throat burning, stomach cramping sobs. I laid in the dark of my basement apartment and let loose, hoping I wasn’t waking my landlords but hardly caring if I did, I just couldn’t seem to stop. I kept telling myself to stop, my brain begged my tear ducts to turn off, my hands clamped over my mouth to stifle any moans that could have made a banshee jealous, and I struggled to catch my breath, panicking that I would pass out.
That went on for about twenty minutes before I decided that sleep was no longer an option.
I got out of bed, turned on the lamp, sat on my couch and switched on the good old Turner Classic Movie station. White noise has always helped me concentrate, so what better than a Margaret O’Brien black and white to filter my thoughts?
Why was I so upset?
Before I was wiping away the tears, I knew that they weren’t for my friend. I’m not a clingy person. I’m the oldest of three kids; I know how to share. The fact that she has found a partner was not the reason for my contention. In fact, there was nothing about what she had told me over the phone that had caused the onslaught of waterworks. She is happy with her fiancée, with her job, with the apartment they will be moving into in two weeks...life is finally working out for her.
And that’s when it struck me.
Two words, two tiny, nearly unnoticeable, wholly unimpressive words began flashing in my mind’s eye like florescent OPEN signs.
Life. Finally.
I’m not sure which word to put more emphasis on; they are both equally weighty to me.
Like most of you out there, my life has not taken the course I had thought it would when I was a dreamy-eyed, innocently optimistic and confident sixteen year old.
I am twenty-five. I have a Bachelors degree in English and a Masters degree in Drama. I am living in Brampton, close enough to Toronto to appreciate the city, but far enough away to feel like I’m in a smaller town. I live in the basement apartment of a couple that I truly like and feel safe with. I am about to begin my third semester in the Tourism Management program at Humber College and I have an administrative assistant job on campus.
This is not the life I had mapped out for myself.
I was never supposed to return to school after getting my Masters. I was supposed to secure full-time work immediately after my convocation and live in either the south-western or northern Ontario regions and not find myself sucked into the eye of the storm known as Toronto. I was supposed to be engaged to the love of my life by twenty-three, married by twenty-five and beginning a family before twenty-eight, not find myself stranded on single’s boulevard for the last seven years. I was supposed to be taking luscious and exotic holidays around the world, not feel a fluttering excitement whenever I see the Big Nickel, my hometown’s claim to fame. I was supposed to be financially stable, not having to decide between No Name and Chef Boyardee because I’m restrained by a strict food budget thanks to the overpowering student debt I have incurred over the years. I was supposed to be a successful...something.
And that’s when I realized.
Thanks to the Nexus of All Evil (or Facebook as it is known in layman’s terms) I have been able to keep tabs on almost everyone I knew in high school and university. Over our years apart, my friends, past and present, have gone on European trips, earned diplomas, trades papers, certifications and degrees, have bought houses, found jobs in their field, lost enough weight to make Jenny Craig tear up, have become engaged, gotten married, gotten pregnant, and have had children and are starting to live the life that every late twentysomething strives for.
Finally.
There has been no ‘finally’ in my life for quite a long time, not since I earned my MA.
In fact, there has been no ‘life’ in my life for just as long.
There is no ‘life’ to attach a ‘finally’ to.
Every day I wake up, get dressed, go to school, go to work, go home, make supper and go to sleep. It’s like a video stuck on a loop. Thank God for Sundays when I go grocery shopping and do my laundry or else there would be no variation at all!
I like where I am currently living, but I know I don’t want to live there forever. I have no direction with my current school program, but at this stage I’m so far in debt to OSAP that my only options are to complete this course or get a full-time – and when I say full-time what I really mean is well paying – job. When school is over next May, I have no idea what I want to do or where I want to go and the thought of humbling myself to move back in with my parents for the third time makes me want to scream (what can I say; there is still a spark of that cocky sixteen year old nestled within my heart). Here in Brampton, I am pretty much alone. My friends don’t live nearby and I don’t own a car, so I look ahead to weekends with a sense of melancholy dread, knowing it’ll be another two days of ‘Ashley-time’ since there is really no one else around to spend time with.
So, my life, as I know it, is at a total standstill. And where do you go when you’re not moving? I mean, really, every direction is possible, so which way do I go? It’s at times like these that I wish I had a map. Everything is so uncertain, so up-in-the-air, and the chances for making the wrong decision seem so much more probable than getting lucky and going down the right road. There’s only one thing I know for sure...
My best friend is getting married, and in all likelihood, I will be at her wedding sometime next summer.
One year.
On a screen, it seems like a long time. Even on a calendar, twelve months appears to be never ending. Heck, I have a day planner that’s about three-quarter inches thick. Lots of time...theoretically. And when one comes to a rattling realization about where their choices have taken them and how they’ve shaped the reality they walk through every day, time is about all you have left.
I wiped away the tears. I blew my nose. I puttered quietly around my apartment until it was five. I got dressed for work, did my make-up and hair, packed my lunch, put on my headphones and headed for the bus. And I made a decision.
One year.
I’m giving myself one year to get back the life I’ve left trapped in suspended animation. For a long time, I thought I was waiting for life to catch up to me, but that night I realized that I was the one who had to catch up to life. If I want there to be a life, and if I want there to be a finally attached to it, then I need to begin something so that I can see it to its end.
So I have set a time limit.
August 25th, 2011.
Ashley’s year of catching up to her life.
