Life's Line

If there is one thing you should know, it is your time will come. When I was younger, I saw my life as a line drawn with a pen against a ruler. Up, up, up I went; nothing would stand in my way: I would grow, go to school, become president, marry, have children, and live a life filled with sweet ecstasy and Kodak moments.

But life is not a straight line, nor is it a steady incline. Vertical limits are reached after the steepest of climbs exhausted, broken, and sometimes barely alive. Unfortunately, no one, no one that I know, wants to cover the distance between here and there. We all want to magically appear at the destination, forgoing the journey, I do.

Nothing like life to let you know that is not how things work. I always figured that eros and pragma would meet me along the way. I thought of marriage as this abstract inevitability a natural progression in the order of this thing we call life. I thought I would love my first job, I thought I would love my first apartment, and my first boyfriend would be my last.

Every year I drew that line again and again, and every year life erased it.

Where does love’s line begin? Does it begin with yes, I do, a mother holding her newborn child, a father dancing with his daughter, two friends laughing uncontrollably, Jesus dying on the cross? Does love’s line end with death, divorce, famine, hate?

Every year I thought would be the year. I told my life exactly what I wanted, exactly when I wanted it, but life does not play a written part. It does not memorize lines.

The line is still there, but the weight it carries has changed. I am no longer caught up in the superficial glamour and goal setting pace of life. I still have dreams and aspirations, but I am bit more flexible. Some things will happen and some things won’t that’s just the way it is. Some things you get and they look nothing like you thought they would.

I still draw the line, but not pen in pencil.

If there is one thing you should know, it is your time will come but not on a timelines line, not when you think you are ready and not even when you are. But your time will come.

Christine A.