The Role of a LIfetime

Prologue

I once heard somebody say that life is nothing more than a series of first steps, when you take that final first step it means that you're ready to take your last. I don't know if that's true or not. I'm going to leave it up to smarter people than me to figure it out. There is only one thing that I know for sure. There is only one thing that I know for certain. I am getting ready to take my first step as an adult and the thought of that absolutely terrifies me.

Okay maybe that's not a hundred percent true. Don't get me wrong I am scared out of my ever loving mind but it's more of a good kind of fear that I'm feeling right now. It's not like when Dani and I went to see that crappy low budget horror movie that everybody was raving about last Halloween. Dani could always deal with those types of scares better than I can. Maybe that was why I turned down the chance to star in the thing. Not that I would have been the star mind you. In those types of films the genre is really the star. Most people wouldn't have even remembered I was in it. That wasn't the type of
career that I was interested in having. Anyway, I'm getting off track here. This was a good kind of fear. I"m sure that you all know what I'm talking about. The type of fear that you feel when you're getting ready for your first date. The nervous energy building up in your stomach so bad that you feel like you might start throwing up and never stop. Taking every piece of clothing out of your closet to try it on only to realize that none of them are right. Going through these motions again and again, trying different combinations of everything, hoping beyond hope that something will work, that something will speak to you. Knowing the entire time that nothing will ever work and you are totallly hopeless and clueless. Eventually deciding to put on the first outfit that you dug out of your closet. Not because something finally spoke to you after all of that time but because you simply can not try on any more clothes. That is exactly where I am right now.

I am currently riding in a stretch limo that is easily the size of half a city block. The hole in the ozone layer is getting a little bit bigger tonight and it's all my fault. I made myself a mental note to find out if somebody had thought to purchase the carbon offsets for our little adventure. God would you listen to me. I can be such a bitch sometimes, especially when I'm nervous. I assure you that is all it is right now, is nerves. I would defy anybody who was going to do what I was about to do, not to be nervous. If they were to say that they weren't I would call them a liar.

I look around this limo at all the people who hang on the outer edges of my life and in this moment, in this second, I want, no I need them to be gone. The people I really care about. The people who mean the most to me, my family, my Dad and my Sister, are sitting next to me. I find them watching me, watching my every move. I am good at masking my emotions. Nobody can read me. Nobody can tell what I'm thinkng. Nobody except the two of them that is. My family, they're both lawyers and are masters at reading people. As much as I love them I had never wanted to be them. I was my own person and I had always wanted my own life, as different as our paths may be, I was okay with that. until this very moment that is. In this moment I found that I didn't exactly want to be them but I wanted to have their ability to read people. I wanted in this moment to know what they were feeling and what they were thinking. In this moment I found that I wanted that even more than I wanted to win and that was pretty damn bad.

Doing what I do for a living, I found that I tended to get lost in my own thoughts. I guess it was a trait of a creative personality, I don't know. I do know that I can be startled easily when I'm in my own head. In that moment I was so far deep inside my own head that I thought I would never come out. I always do though. Usually jumping out of my own skin when it happens. My Dad was the first person to break the silence inside this limo and when he did I thought that I would jump out of my skin. I, in fact came close to hitting my head on the roof of the car. I did have to stifle a scream. That would not have been a good thing for the other people in this limo to see. I took a couple of deep breaths that slapped my Dad on his chest. He made it his mission in life to tease me. I didn't know why I expected this night to be any different. In a way it made me feel better that it wasn't. It made me realize that no matter how much things may change and after this night they were going to change, somethings, the most important things would in fact never change.
"Penny for your thoughts," he asked me.