Impossible Things

             
Her earliest dreams were of faraway places, grand adventures, and finding someone that she could be herself with, someone like her. As she grew up she tried to hold onto those dreams, tried to fight against the tide of pessimism that was the way of the world in which she lived, but she wasn’t able to, and as each year passed her dreams became more and more faded until they were only faint whispers in her heart. By the time she was a teenager, the little girl that she had once been was a stranger, even to herself.

The young woman that she had become over the years was one that had learned to fit in, to become someone that others found acceptable, and someone who dreamed conventional dreams.

But to those that had known her before, and accepted her for who she was, it seemed as if the butterfly had gone back into her cocoon. Her beauty, remarkable as a child, seemed to fade along with her dreams, until she was simply pretty. Normal. The girl next door.

At least on the surface.

Underneath it all, unknown even to herself, deeply buried beneath others expectations, was still that little girl, and that little girl and her suppressed dreams found their way out, the way that they always manage to, one way or another. For her they found their way out through addiction.

Most of the time she was able to control
her addiction, to push it down and go about her normal life, there were even weeks when she didn’t feel a single craving. But then, without warning, the need would come over her. The fever that she knew so well would start under her skin as a slow burn in the pit of her stomach and it would work its way through muscle and bone, until it filled her body and became all that she could think about. 

             
When it was at its worst she was consumed with it. She would do anything that she had to do to stop the craving. She spent hours online hoping to slack it. But there always came a point when pictures were no longer enough, and when that point came she would skip classes, call in sick to work, lie to her friends, family and boyfriend and give in to the addiction. She would wallow in it, spend money that she couldn’t afford, and let it consume her until the fever was banked. Only then was she able to resume control of her life again.

             
It was an addiction that she had been fighting for most of her life, but besides her parents no one else knew of her deep, dark secret, and that was the way that she planned on keeping it. As a teenager she had caused a lot of trouble and heartache for her parents because she had become a thief, stealing in order to satisfy her cravings.

             
Each time that she got caught her parents would somehow talk her way out of the trouble, but on the way home the lectures would start, and as long as she lived she would never be able to forget the droning of her father’s voice as he told her over and over again that there was no use in wanting things that she couldn’t have, of dreaming of a different life, or of wishing for more.

She was who she was, and it was time for her to face reality.

              She resented his lectures and she resented the disappointment that crossed his face every time he looked at her. She felt lost and alone in a world that she didn’t understand and that didn’t want to understand her.

Wi
th no other way out, she poured herself into her studies, graduated at the top of her high school class, and received a scholarship to a prestigious college in the north.

Her parents were proud of her; she felt nothing.

It was at her graduation dinner that she realized that everything hadn’t been forgotten. No matter how much she did, no matter how hard she worked, it was never going to be enough for her dad. To him she would always be the trouble-making teenager wanting impossible things.

They had ordered their meals and were about to start on their salads when her dad handed her a long velvet box. She fought to stay calm as she accepted it and gently opened the lid. She managed to smile down at the strand of pearls inside, and then up her dad as she said, “Thank you.”

              He beamed back at her, obviously proud of himself as he said, “You’ve worked hard these past few years and you deserve them. I know they may not be what you want, but these are perfect for you. They’re the kind of jewels that a real lady wears, they’re normal and decent.”

             
Lucy turned to her mother and smiled again, but she could see from the look in her mom’s eyes that she didn’t buy it, and later, when her dad got up to use the restroom, her mom moved to his seat and reached out to touch her. “Lucy I tried to tell him that it was a bad idea but you know your father, he wouldn’t listen to me.”

             
Lucy avoided looking at her mom as she asked, “Mom what is his idea of a real lady? Do
you
even know? He’s been preaching that line at me for eighteen years and I still don’t know what it means. Nothing I do is ever good enough for him.”

             
She stopped. She had said too much, revealed too much. She took a deep breath and asked, “Are they real?”

Her mother nodded. “Of course they are, and he’ll never know if you take them back or sell them and get a strand of fakes.”

              Lucy looked up as her mother reached into her purse and pulled out a slip of paper. “Here’s the receipt. Take them back and get what you want or get a store credit. Just buy a fake necklace to wear around him.”

             
Lucy nodded and put the receipt in her purse. She went to pick up her drink but her mother stopped her with a hand on her arm. “What now? Will you go there? I mean…will you go and see her before you start school?”

             
Shocked at the change of subject Lucy looked around to see where he dad was. She and her mom hadn’t discussed her grandmother in over ten years. “Mom I don’t need a lecture.”

             
“No! No. I wasn’t going to give you one. I just thought that if you see her…would you give her my love and tell her that I miss her?”

             
Lucy saw the tears pool in her mom’s eyes and she had to fight not to cry herself. “Mom why? Why did you let him keep us from her? Why do you stay with him?”

             
Her mother sniffed and used her napkin to carefully dab the corners of her eyes. She sat up straight and carefully brushed down the jacket of her pale pink suit. She looked elegant and dignified, like a lady, as she said, “I know you don’t understand. I know you think he’s cold and uncaring but he’s not always. He loves me, and he loves you. He just wants us to be a normal family.”

             
Lucy nodded even though she didn’t understand.

She was eighteen-years-old and her heart ached with suppressed desires and dreams. The little girl that she had once been hadn’t wanted to be normal. She
’d just wanted to be herself.

But teenage Lucy had been pretending for so long that she no longer knew who that was.

              Her father came back to the table at that point and they had resumed their bland and meaningless conversation in which a lot was said but none of it meant anything.

Just like a normal family.

              Life away from her parents hadn’t gone according to plan. Instead of making the trip to Europe to see her grandmother, like she had been planning for years, she had moved into her apartment near her University and within two hours she’d met Sam.

Sweet, wonderful, perfect Sam, who was as normal as normal could get.

Loving Sam had been a revelation to her. Theirs wasn’t the kind of love that she had dreamed of as a young girl. It wasn’t a meeting of like-minded souls, and it wasn’t a fire that burned out of control like her secret desires. It was a lonely girl meeting a handsome boy who made her feel wanted.

It was a slow process of adaptation that settled in her heart and finally around her life. She hadn’t known before Sam that there was more than one kind of love.

              It took only a month for him to convince her that they should live together, so she moved into his cramped apartment over the coffee shop where he worked part-time, and they began to build a life together. Those first years were good. They woke in the mornings to the noises from the street below and would lie in bed making love in pools of warm summer sun and cold winter haze until the alarm would go off.

If she ever thought about her dreams, which happened less and less as time went by, they were distant, fleeting thoughts that she quickly pushed away. She told herself that she was blessed. She and Sam rarely fought and life seemed, not magical and exciting, but happy, in a way that she had never expected.

College raced by because life was full and because she enjoyed what she was studying. Her dad wanted her to major in something sensible like nursing or accounting but because he wasn’t paying she realized that for once she didn’t need his approval, so she majored in architecture and loved every minute of it.

She didn’t realize it but the more time that she spent doing what she loved, the more she began to dream again. Her new dreams weren’t the grand fantasies of childhood though,
her new dreams were just of going to grad school with the hope that one day she would be able to design buildings that would stand forever. It was an acceptable, if naive dream, and one that society, which valued ambition, could understand.

She spent her college years working hard to turn her secret desires off and to
channel her energy into something acceptable. There
were
times when the old craving would rear its head, but those times were few and far between.

In four years of college,
it had only overtaken her twice, and during those times she had lied to Sam and left the city. She told him that she was going away with friends but the truth was that she was traveling to far off cities where she could slack her desires.

             
When she came back she felt sated but dirty. All it took was one look at Sam’s innocent, loving face and she felt like the worst person in the world. She spent weeks making it up to him, being more attentive and loving, while hiding the bills that she’d racked up. More than once she thought about telling him but she knew that he was like her father. He was too normal to understand.

             
He would try to understand, of that she had no doubt. Unlike her father, Sam tried to be sensitive to her feelings. When she talked of the dreams that she had for designing buildings that would mean something to future generations, he listened, but he couldn’t really understand. He was too practical, too rooted in a world of reality that was ugly, cold, and without meaning.

He could only comprehend what he could see and touch. He could understand the building, but not the meaning behind it.

If he knew the true depths of her desires, then he might think badly of her and she’d had enough of that to last a lifetime.

             
Years passed and she found it easier and easier to fit in, to think like everyone else.

She was happy for the most part. After all it wasn’t possible to be happy all the time; at least that was what she was told.

She and Sam worked, paid their bills, ran errands, made love a few times a week, and went on vacation. They lived normal lives like everyone else they knew. If she had moments when she felt like crying, moments when she wanted to run away from it all that was probably normal as well, though she never asked any of her friends, just in case they didn’t feel that way.

She and Sam had both finished graduate programs and Lucy was working as an intern while studying for her license when Sam came home with an announcement.

He had secretly applied to an intern program in London and been accepted.