White Picket Dreams

It was late at night and one of my friends was driving me home from a diner where we had just spent a few hours with a rambunctious group of kids, who I’m sure the wait staff must have hated. He parked his car in my driveway and leaned over to give me a kiss. A minute or two later he pulled away and stared at me. “I think you like the idea of me more than you like me.” he said. I assured him that wasn’t true, but I knew it was.

See, I knew fairy tales before I knew friendship, so I tried to turn people in to heroes, and attempted to map out their character arc. I thought I knew how the story should go, so instead of reading it a page at a time, I needed to skip ahead, to the end of the chapter to make sure that everything was going to come out ok.

Barbed wire fences and white picket dreams were never the things that inspired me. I wanted action and adventure. I wanted princes and princesses and to be the hero of the kind of story that my mother would have read to me before I went to sleep.

But I’ve never been sure if I’m the main character of my tale, or the author, making it up as I go along. Or maybe I’m somewhere in between, creating my life as I live it- shaping the pages of my story as I survive the ups and the downs and the weird in-betweens. But my life isn’t Stranger Then Fiction and most characters are unaware of the work put in behind the scenes that keeps their lives running the way they do.

So I fumble in to the realm of cliché a little more then I’m proud of, and constantly seem to write and live myself in to corners that seem inescapable and plots that seem like dead end drives. I panic too often to be relatable and I’m not social enough for any reader to think I’m going to be fun. I’m trying very very hard, but 

I don’t think I’m ever going to have mass market appeal. I’m never going to be a New York Times best seller, but I’m holding out hope for cult classic. The kind that’s so cheesy you can’t help but like it. The kind so sincere it makes you smile, even when you know it’s lame. Full of weird jokes and strange characters, and the kind of tales that must be fiction, since they’re too weird to be believed. The kind of book that you want to read and reread and share with your friends, and quote in awkward situations.

I guess I’m just hoping my life will be better than the stories I read. More kind and more true, and most importantly more real. True doesn’t mean unheroic or uninspired, it just means more livable. My story is still in motion, there are still chapters to come and characters to be introduced and adventures to conquer.

I’m creating my story. Letting the pages fill up with my life as I live it.

And I think and I hope that I’m doing it well.