I have a serious problem with rules. I can’t accept the “this is the way it’s always been done” mentality. My ex-husband once told me, “why do you have to question every single thing? Why do you have to be such a rebel?” Well, I’m a dreamer…which automatically means there is always another way things can work out!
If I’m honest with myself, I had always wanted to be just an average girl in high school. I clearly remember hating myself because my sarcastic comments or my inability to keep my mouth shut when I disagreed often got me into more arguments with friends than I intended. In addition, I am pretty sure that my secret yearning for existential conversation wouldn’t have fared well among my friends. At 15, you can’t look at the “popular” girls and say shit like, “isn’t it cool how every one of us came from the same material that makes up every star in the universe?” I mean, saying something like that won’t get you too many party invites.
See, “things” (the world, song lyrics, books, poems, comets crashing into the planet) have always deeply affected me. I can read a poem and spend weeks examining the gravity of it and how it fundamentally changes my perspective on the world. Or the time in 1994 when Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter. I remember watching the broadcast on tv at my grandparent’s house. I seriously worried about this for years. I took an astronomy class in college just so I could learn more about comets and asteroids. (that literally was the only reason I took the class) The fear of comets crashing into the planet only grew until one day someone told me, “Hayley, I have a fear of building a house and the plumbing system backing up and shit spraying all over me. Now what do you think the chances of that happening are?” And that was how my fear of comets crashing into the planet ended.
In the 8th grade, I built a miniature model of an ecosystem to show the effects of global warming on our planet. I had a heat-lamp, thermometers, a fish tank with a little village in it, and everything. I got second place because I told my science teacher that I had a secretarial service make these really cool headers for my project report. (I should add that my honesty has gotten me into more trouble than it has been worth throughout my life…I should have practiced being a better liar.) The guy who won made a clock run with a potato. I’m serious. I still haven't gotten over that. Screw the planet, right? Look at this clock this kid made with a starchy vegetable. (side note: This has nothing to do with the point of this tale, but I’m still not completely over it yet…still a little angsty about the entire thing)
Anyway…
I feel like my life has been this series of free-falling, “let’s see what happens” experiences. I am sure, on more than one occasion, my family and friends have looked at my life choices and thought to themselves, “what the hell is she doing?” That’s okay. I really didn’t know what I was doing either. I tend to just jump without much forethought about how fast I’m falling or the consequences. While some of my jumps have brought me amazing life experiences, other jumps left me a bit broken and bruised.
I can say, looking back, that I’ve very few regrets. There are just a handful of “what ifs” that visit me from time to time. The thing is, these what ifs were really big. When they do visit, they like to stay for months. I play their songs over and over in my head until they finally stop singing or I put them to bed with a “there’s nothing you can do about that now.”
One, in particular, likes to visit most often. I’m reminded of it in the lyrics to various songs, the lines in books or poems, the stars in the night sky, the waves crashing on the beach. It has become an old friend of sorts. Sometimes the what if is comforting; other times, it can bring tremendous pain. But the thing is, I feel like maybe we are all just stumbling along, chasing our shadows along some broken path, the sun to our backs. Maybe Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is spot on. Maybe we are all just staring at a wall of what we think our lives should look like. (I seriously can't help waxing all existential) But really, suppose all of the what ifs were just moments we were afraid to turn around, the light of the sun too bright for our eyes to take, too scary for us to face?
I had one moment, long ago, where turning around might have changed my entire life. And it haunts me constantly. When you are faced with a moment when you know that simply turning your head will change every thing, you tend to remember those kinds of things. You can’t just file that under “Remember When” and move on. You replay it over and over, and you reimagine every moment. Your second chances come in the form of dreams that you never want to wake up from. It sort of sits in your subconscious and peeks out sporadically, just so you know it’s still there.
A thousand times, I have replayed that single moment. I’ve stood there in the space between what could have been and what is and evaluated how the story would end. And maybe it ended exactly as it should have. Maybe refusing to turn around was exactly what was supposed to happen. Or maybe I just think too much…both are equally possible. After all, I’ve a penchant for over-analyzation.
In The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho, there is this incredibly moving point in the story when Santiago is riding through the desert in search of his personal legend, and he has this beautiful conversation with his own heart. His heart tells him, “People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don't deserve them, or that they'll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren't, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.”
I like these lines because they speak to me on so many levels. The truth is that there have been times I was afraid to turn away from shadows and stare directly into the sun; I was afraid of what might happen. I’ve always been an all or nothing type of person, and I get that it takes a special kind of person to love me and accept all of my weird little idiosyncrasies.
I’m not a woman who was built to accept the world as it is and sit in some silent disheartenment. I’m a dreamer; I admit this about myself. I see the world for the way I wish it would be, not the way it really is. And that has let me down more than a few times. The hardest part about being this kind of person is that you always imagine the “what ifs” because the dreamer knows there is never just one way the story can end. There is always, always, another.
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