Twas Brillig

Soap Opera Sunday is being hosted by Abish today. Head on over to her site for her post and for links to the rest of the soapiness. (For more info about Soap Opera Sunday, read this.)

(This story began here and continued to here and then here…)

Suddenly I was single— oh how I’d always LOVED being single. The DABU (Day After Break-Up) had always been the happiest. I would go and get my hair done (seriously— strange ritual, I know, but I always did it. People who were close to me always knew when I’d broken up with someone because my hair was suddenly completely different) and then go find at least one cute boy to kiss meaninglessly. (Sometimes, um, more than one…) Ahhhhhhh, so great.

But this, as I said before, was different. No relief, no joy, no haircut, no wasted kisses. Just misery, sorrow, loneliness, and… well… tears. Lots of ‘em.

The feeling of having just made the biggest mistake of my life.

I went to work, I went through all the motions, I continued on with my life. But I felt so hollow, so empty. I couldn’t get Blake out of my mind.

I knew that if I called him, he would take me right back. I was completely confident in his love for me. But I also knew that if I were to call him, I would have to be ready to answer that Big Question. Calling him would be the equivalent of signing my name to a marriage license.

WHY couldn’t I do that? How many women were wandering around DYING to fall in love, DYING to be loved back, DYING to be married and start popping out babies? What was wrong with me? The perfect man, the perfect life, the perfect love, and it scared me to death.

Surely I was meant for something bigger. Surely I was meant for something more exciting and noteworthy and celebratory than marriage. I had dreams, plans, goals. Granted, I wasn’t making any progress towards those dreams and goals. In fact, the more steps I took towards them, the more they sounded like someone else’s desires rather than my own.

And suddenly I found myself in the middle of an identity crisis.

All my life, it had always been the same problem. As a child, when asked in school what I wanted to be when I grew up, I never had an answer. I never had any idea what I really wanted to do or who I wanted to be. As I was finishing up high school and was courted by various universities, I didn’t know where I wanted to go or why. Once I found myself in college, I changed my major not once but FOUR times in the 3 semesters I attended college— and nothing I “tried on” ever seemed to “fit”.

Others had picked up on my aimlessness. I still have parent/teacher conference reports dating back to third grade filled with comments such as, “Brillig has so much potential, but she doesn’t seem to have any goals or direction.” Potential, potential, potential. That’s all I ever heard. Potential that I was never living up to, because I could never find a reason to dedicate myself to anything. Potential… so much potential. There came a point where it made me furious. Potential for what????

Who was I, and what exactly did I want?

I dropped to my knees, as I had so many times before, and begged to know what it was that I was supposed to be doing.

And then, slowly but surely, what started as a little thought grew into a conviction and then to an urgent, all-consuming knowledge.

The things that had seemed so important before were now clearly nothing but silliness. The “dreams, goals, and plans” were no longer who I was— I wasn’t even sure they ever had been. They were so trivial and absolutely not worth trading true love for.

I still didn’t quite know who I was or what I wanted out of life, but I knew one thing for sure: I was in love with Blake. He was my future. He was the one dream, goal, and plan that now held any place in my heart.

And so I picked up the phone and nervously dialed his number…

(to be continued…)