Potentiality

A tiny flame grows into a roaring fire in seconds plus oxygen. A simple wish becomes a lifelong dream with every 11:11 I encounter. My daughter is five in the blink of an eye. I'm afraid to close my eyes anymore.

There is a little stone house amidst the lavender fields in Provence that could have been mine. A cottage by the sea in Nantucket that called out to me. A cocktail waitress job on the beaches of Fiji I passed by. An orange grove in Key West caught my eye, and a tiny bookstore in the Upper Peninsula whispers to me, even now.

There was a life waiting on a mesa in New Mexico, and one in the valley of Boulder Colorado. Tumultuous waves reached for me on the shores of Lake Michigan, and peaceful highways led east to the Atlantic sea.

And I have managed to embed myself in small town suburbia, the same in which I grew up. I read once that half of Americans live within 50 miles of where they grew up. I am not one of those Americans. And yet I am. I teach in a high school just like the one I attended so many years ago, we even have the same school colors. The students, they are the same ones I went to school with, only outfitted with cell phones and ipods instead of walkmans.

There is a girl with long blond hair in my creative writing class. She longs to be different, a poet, a tortured soul, an ingenue. And yet she is the same as all the other teens, growing up in a tiny bedroom town, privileged, and I recognize myself in her dreamy stares, her hand scribbled words on notebook paper. There is so much potentiality out there, so much she can fly away with, if she is brave enough.

I want to be brave. I want the happy ending. The second chance. The house on the shore. The life I know I was supposed to live. No matter how many shells I bring home or what I affectionately name my beach house in the burbs, I am far too long from the shore. The potentiality is there, so thick I can taste it like honey, golden sweet on the tongue. Spring must be around the corner, for I can hear the waves calling.