Extra Credit Blog Post

           I hung up the landline and turned towards the living room, moving more slowly since I had fallen and broken my leg two years ago than I liked to admit. The bad leg still gave me pain sometimes and I eased it up onto the couch. For a second, I wondered whether I should make the journey back to the kitchen and get some ice from the freezer. I decided against it, and let myself sink back into the pillows. It was evening, but the house was quiet. Gone were the days when I used to pick Sally up from ballet and Ben from football. The three of us would pour through the door, spreading out over the house. Sally at the kitchen table doing her homework, Ben at the TV watching sports until I had to yell at him to stop, and me cookin’ dinner. 

            Now they were both in college. I smiled to myself for a moment. I was proud of them. I was also proud of myself. Who knew that my children would end up in college? I had to admit that against all odds, things had turned out pretty well. I had raised my family successfully, had a boutique with a bunch of regular customers and the occasional tourist, and I had even joined a book club with some of the other women in my neighborhood. Anyone looking at my life from the outside would have thought that it was fine. Perfectly, wonderfully, utterly, fine. And it was. But that’s all it was. Just fine.

            I loved California, I really did. It’s true that something always pulled me back to this godforsaken state. No matter where I was, I felt the pull. I thought of my young, wild and free days when I roamed the nation, free. That seemed like a lifetime ago. A lifetime ago and paradise. But was it really? Maybe I was romanticizing the past, romanticizing my forays into random states with random men, romanticizing all those times I’d hitchhiked, romanticized all those nights where I didn’t know where I was going to sleep. What was a lifetime of traveling anyway? What was the point behind it? I know that sometimes I wished I never stopped traveling, but what would my life be like had I done that. Where would the people I loved be? What would be the last thing I thought of before I took my last breath? My mind flashed through all the people I’d met—the man in the S.F. diner where I worked in my early twenties, the family rolling through small town Mississippi, the man with the poodle strolling the streets of Monterrey, to name a few. Did I want to be like any of them? I thought hard about this for a couple minutes. There were all sorts of ways I could’ve convinced myself that I didn’t want any fiber of my being to be anything like those people. But I knew if I’d done this then I would’ve been lying.