Happy Is What Happens

Yesterday I sat in the big fancy conference room with my coffee mug filled with the last of my Starbucks birthday card Macchiato and signed my name to contracts to literally work my dream job. And then, we rehearsed. Dreams come true are curious creatures. Is this the dream? The closer it gets in the first place, the less glowing it seems until for lunch you are eating a cold piece of avocado toast and highlighting haphazardly.

But I DO still feel full of something--zip or zest--that tightens around me. This was day two of rehearsal. I woke up early to run lines on the gym elliptical. I ate a spinach bowl. I answer emails furiously on the train. I laugh a lot. I think a lot. I try a lot. I wonder a lot. Everything you get you once wanted very much, and that is strange.

There's a kind of a sort of cost--

There's a couple of things get lost.

Something Is Not the Same

When I was 18 I performed in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Before the festival, my cast did some Shakespeare classes at the Globe.
One day after class we went shopping.
I was being a cheapskate in preparation for college.
I only looked at sale racks.
Everything was still too expensive.
Then, in one boutique, I found one solitary pair of jeans for just five pounds!
By a stoke of magic luck, they fit!
I loved the heck out of my London jeans.
Until I gained the freshman thirty.
Boop.
I got rid of my little girl clothes as my hips rolled out and my shoulders pulled up.
I put the jeans in storage.
Training for the marathon transformed my body like college did.
I don't look like I'm 18, but somehow the jeans fit again.
A little snugger, a little shapelier.
I also have a pair of green tennies from 2004.
My sister wants me to throw them away. Holes.
I wore them yesterday because it was one of those holes-in-your-shoes days.
I looked down at my ankles at the end of my acting seminar class.
The professor was my professor in Acting I.
The first class I took in college.
The green toes, the London hem.
From the knees down, I was a freshman again.
We're freshmen at life, my friends joke
and my clothes agree.


London jeans! In Scotland! When they were new!

It's time to trust my instincts, close my eyes, and leap.