A Wife with a Life

photo by Christina Watka

I want to run my long flat feet through that grass over there where it is not only greener, but plush like body pillows, bunny rabbit stuffed animals and ball pits brimming with partially melted marshmallows. Here, my lower back bellows from walking barefoot on this harsh bald earth. I didn't get the part in that play. I can't spend every day in cafes writing about baristas and biscotti. I can't entertain every evening with stimulating theater rehearsals or inspiring yoga classes. I can't wait in anxious excitement for first kisses and timid touches of new lovers. My unfortunate self, surrounded by love and safety, secrets and intimacy, of promises that propose to stretch to the end of lifetimes.

My written woes are abundantly self-involved, but are not unaccompanied by perspective. When these temptations and complaints creep into my mouth, I squint through twisting kaleidoscopes to see. My brain deciphers the colors and shapes into ever altering images where my soft cover romance fantasies are as two dimensional and as thin as my skin. My heart sees that were it to leap for these painted lives, these mirages of mortal distraction, the aforementioned plushness would tip and fall flat and my old life (where a smart, sensitive, splendid husband holds me and kisses my cheeks; where I can audition ambitiously and write freely) suddenly expands like bathtub sponges. Blue, red and yellow squishy dinosaurs, sailboats and duckies grow up and out of the capsules I once mistook for gravel. My home, my old abandoned life, turns into a beautiful bay, a still Jurassic Park where ripples of soapy bath water rock my raft of stapled watercolor papers, anchoring me to a newly furnished swamp of black flies and incredible stench. Today, the kaleidoscope's colors and shapes evolved into white clarity when my heart and head collided into synchronicity and I saw myself searching for self esteem in the shallow flirtations of strangers and in the flowered flattery of friends and family.

I am not yet a successful actress. I tried, but stuck inside self-deprecation, decided I was not pretty enough and far too awkward for even my customer service jobs, let alone auditions for intimidating strangers in small black box theaters and atop massive proscenium stages. I have done nothing tremendous. I've discovered a slight knack for organizing words into selective soulful sentences and I've gotten married, but I still have not been cast in any enormous show nor written any sort of seller. This is not to say I've given up. I store hope, ambition and confidence in a safe place for every delicate day downed by rejections and flat broke failures. Then I swallow my misery like coarse vomit and remind myself that there is still time for me. That I don't need to write or say these types of things. I found love and married it, I can find success and bed it. I can draw my pictures on blank pages, rather than outlined coloring books, without fracturing my or my husband's heart.

Days are short, particularly these winter days when the sun rises at 6 and falls back down at 5 p.m. We stay up later, rebellious to the Earth's spinning threats, but this only makes the dark mornings ever more sudden when the alarm clock mheep, mheep, mheeps. Most mornings, my clock alarms me at 5 a.m. This is to get as many minutes as I can before this day is taken down below to a secretary who sits in my body's basement, surrounded by dusty filing cabinets, categorizing my days with all the ages I will never be again.

Today, I am ready to confront the dreams I once wedged and pushed into pipes. One can be a wife and pursue her own life. I don't know why I am only now understanding this concept. Next January, I will audition for one of the most prestigious Masters of Fine Arts acting programs in the country. For the next 365 days, I will prepare to stand onstage at the Yale School of Drama.