A Dream Deferred

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" Remeber how that questioned plagued your childhood? It was silly really posed by even sillier adults. And was your childhood answer even really believed? Like a five year old knows what their life goal will be and isn't that a lot of pressure to put on a child anyway.  Sideways glances were always exchanged with amusement, eyes squinted in mockery as the stereotypical answers were spewed of fire fighter, police officer, teacher.  None of these respected job were really believed or actualized, otherwise we would have way more fire fighters, police officers, teachers.  I find today's answers are a bit different, with youtube star or content creator being high on the list of unbelievable goals, or maybe the answer is to be nothing at all.  Working a normal nine to five is so out of fashion with today’s youth. Why do all that work anyway when mommy and daddy are so readily available to mop up all of one’s problems while complaining about said problems to their friends over endless glasses of wine.  Their poor Claire was just not made for the hardships of the world or maybe it’s the world that is not made for the hardships of Claire.  

If you were wondering I wanted to be an actress and I said it with all of that childish gusto.  My chosen childhood profession may come as no surprise to you dear reader, since I still revel in my plethora of characters. I did not become an actress, if you were wondering although sometimes I act like I enjoy a particular situation or event, I act like the dutiful daughter, the dutiful employee, but don’t we all have those moments of acting a certain part to make the world more easily bendable.   I did get a taste of stage acting in college and I loved every blessed minute of it.  But life got in the way after graduation (marrying my first husband too young wasn't a great start) and then there was the more reasonable side of my brain who convinced me that the world was too scary to venture too far from my small hometown. To be fair I did grow up in the 90s, before cell phones, when everthing seemed so much smaller somehow, less easy to access.  

I don’t think I really gave my chosen passion much of a serious thought actually and I don’t know why that was.  I had seedlings of talent, something that undoubtedly could have been molded into something greater given time, mentoring, opportunity, but I let it all slip through my fingers like you do when you're younger and don’t see your full potential in the face of what makes a fulfilled life. I never really had anyone to push me into believing in my true potential, although I have never been one for coddiling, too stuck in a brain that is just too full of all the negative what ifs, I feel like I’m sometimes drowning in self doubt.

I know you should never dwell on what could have been because really what is the point to all of that, but can’t I just wallow in what I should have done or been for a moment more? Because sometimes I do like the dark wallowing even though I know how unhealthy it is, but what can I say? The heavy covers, the soft pillows, feel so good to hide behind sometimes.

Langston Hughes wrote a whole poem about what happens to a dream that is never actualized.  It’s a sad thing to read, a bit downtrodden, and something that I can totally relate to.  Just because a dream is never realized, it doesn’t die within the person, or at least it hasn’t with me.  It has festered the older I’ve become, nibbling away through parts of my brain like some sort of brain eating zombie. My dream of acting hasn’t grown sweeter the longer I ignore it, like Highes proposed it might, but it has festered. There is a positive to that actually because that festering has caused me to try to pursue something else, something in the arts, something where I can finally create again.

My time on the stage or even screen for that matter will never by my reality, but writing perhaps will. It allows me to step into the life of a character for awhile as I plot out their conflicts, their relationships, their loves, their hates.  I find it therapeutic to a certain degree.  I’m actually working on my third book right now.  The other two failed to land me a literary agent, but I am nothing if not resolute in my pursuit for something more for myself.  I may have deferred my dream, but I haven’t allowed it to dry up; I’m only 44 afterall.  Jane Lynch was 43 when she got her big break in the mockumentary BEST IN SHOW, Julia Child published her first cookbook and hosted her first television show in her late 40s and 50s, Laura Ingalls Wilder published her first book at the age of 65, Toni Morrison was 39,  J.R.R Tolkien 45, and Grandma Moses, who started painting at age 77, went onto become a celebrated folk artist.

So, in celebration of my passion for writing, my dream of one day getting published, I’m going to share something with you reader.  I have almost completed the third rewrite of my third novel and I’m leaving the prologue here for you to read, enjoy, or even perhaps to leave me notes of what you think.  I really hope that you do the latter actually; it will help me grow as a writer and as an artist.

I may not get this book published either, but I already have a list of other ideas for the untold stories that live rent free in my mind.  My dream may have been deferred for several years, but it will never run away from me or sag like old loose skin, as long as I have a creative mind, creative pursuits, and the perseverance to continue pass failure, maybe it will one day explode into something more amazing than I can even imagine.

Parts Of Us

By Elizabeth Ragain Orta

Prologue

The blood spewed out of him so fast that it rendered me paralyzed.  All I could do was watch the scene unfold; my body refused to flee or help or do much of anything at all, but to just observe with a dull awareness of all that was happening in front of me.  I thought blood was supposed to be red, but that’s not what this was. It was brown, dark, dirty like something that had been charred and spit out.  I watched his face. Denial then shock then fear then despair then acceptance. Like he almost knew, expected that this was to be his end. As his eyes slid towards mine I had to turn away to look at my hands, useless and limp, my fingers, too weak and too slender. I was no longer human, I thought, but a mirage of something unrecognizable even to myself.

If I seem callous,  I don’t mean to be, it’s just been a long time since I had to think about such things and I’m so very grateful for the reprieve.  I do remember screaming through all of that blood although I couldn’t hear the noise, but my mouth was strained open and I felt the muscles in my neck contract so I must have been making some kind of sound.

Some people aren’t so lucky. Some people have to face their feelings over and over again, every day in fact, but that was thankfully not me, isn’t me. I got to be taken away after seeing what I saw, to some place safe, some place familiar, some place that was all mine.  I should go back to the real world now, but I haven’t, I can’t.  I got too comfortable with the away; too comfortable with the predictability of my situation and now I find that I  don’t ever want to go back even if they’d beg, plead, whine their way into making me believe that their life depended on my participation in it.  I’ve just seen too much at this point. My feelings are blissfully buried as long as I’m here, in this room.  I just can’t force a return to a world that is this messy, this tragic, this hopeless even if it means saving all of us.