Staring out my Window, Daydreaming About the Future

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staring out my window

I am staring out my window, thinking.

"Will it always be like this," I wonder?

Where will I be next year? Or in 20 years? Who will I be with? When will it change?

Will I live in a fabulous villa in Tuscany? Spending my days, staring out at the beautiful Italian countryside, approving continental dinner party menu's and calligraphied place settings on thick pressed parchment, kissing my beautiful children before the nanny takes them poolside to play?

Will I move to some assembly line suburb, live in a new house, identical to the twenty around it, in some middle class development? Blasting Janis Joplin as I speed through Anytown, USA?

What a nightmare.

I could never have been that girl, you know? It was never my destiny. And my parents, they get it. I couldn't have stayed in that town, with those people. I wasn't one of them. I pined for years, planning the escape. My escape. And my parents knew it.

When I go back, I see what could have happened if I had not worked to get out. If I had given in and taken the easy road.

I would live in a modern, aluminum-sided housing development near that tragic clique of girls I ran around with...the ones with whom I slouched against the lockers in high school, late for class and not caring, maliciously sticking our feet out and tripping the nerds as they walked by...the ones I let dip their fingers into my brand-spanking new pot of Clinque lip gloss. The ones I played the game with - they thought I was one of them. They didn't know that even at 14 and 15 and 16 and 17 - the whole time - I was just playing along. I had no intention of being one of them.

It's possible that I would drive one of those terribly unfashionable grocery-go-getting minivan contraptions, fitting squirming children for their Buster Browns while my husband wore cheap, off-the-rack suits and even worse polyster ties to his 35K salaried job at which he was equally unhappy.

I would buy ground beef when it went on sale and freeze it. I would watch the Home Shopping Network and when I saw one of those contraptions that holds lint brushes and sewing kit utensils, maybe I would buy it because my husband had promised a long-overdue honeymoon.

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