I stood with the sun beating down on my head, soaking through my hair and reflecting off of the plastic CD cases sitting on the table at the yard sale. Every time I saw that, I wondered at why someone would set out CDs or DVDs when they surely know they will melt.
‘To the Wonder’ the DVD case caught my eye. My god, what an awful movie. Yet it had been the thing that reignited my dream of moving to California and becoming an actress. I may have rolled my eyes as that thought passed through my brain at that point. Dreams. What are they? Did I even know anymore?
My daughter @loliboofae was in that movie, ‘To the Wonder’. She got pulled off the set as an extra (on our first ever film set experience) and was given direction by the big name director. She walked alongside the lead child actress in the film and they chatted about random things. Ben Affleck and some unknown woman walked along and watched the children playing with a cat that walked up, chatting as if they were old friends.
I watched my 13 year old daughter act as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening as a big camera on wheels followed along behind her and this other girl, right in their faces and they filmed for a good long while.
This was freaking amazing and exciting for me as a parent… but also for myself. I had always dreamed of being an actress… a singer… some sort of performing arts. I felt at home on the stage, so much more so than in a crowd. Maybe the acting bug would hit my daughter as well and this would be the thing to take us off on a new adventure.
The memories of that day now seem to flutter away like dust in the wind. That feeling that you know is there, but you just can’t quite wrap your brain around it. You can feel that it’s there, but if you had to grab onto it, or paint it or hell, even describe it, you couldn’t quite ever capture the reality of it.
That’s pretty much what most of my dreams feel like as well. Not that I’ve failed in my dreams, because I did choose to follow my dreams and worked towards them… it’s just that the definition of my dreams seem to have shifted lately. The drive I had for acting, for performing have transitioned into writing and creating with words and typing. I still have an ache, a drive to perform… something. Music seems to be at the edge of my soul lately, so maybe that will be it.
People seem to look at me as though they can figure me out. They think I’m exuberant and outgoing or maybe they know another side of me that is edgy and fighting depression. Maybe they think I’m just that hermit who hates to leave the house… or they follow me on facebook and see that I’m a mom and a grandma… but here’s the deal. I’m like a palimpset. I have accomplished so many things that I wanted to accomplish and I’ve failed at some, too. But all of those things leave a trace or a mark. No matter how many things I would like to forget, they are a part of me now, forever resonating within me, affecting the choices I make, even in a subtle, indefinable way… much like the wind.
These things that make me, they don’t steer me so much as influence how I think. They may cause me to take a left instead of a right or perhaps make the choice to take a right a little bit harder to make… but it’s all up to me.
It’s still my choice what to make of this life of mine. I’ve tried some things and I’ll try so many more before it’s over. I’ve failed at some and succeeded at things I never even dreamed I’d get to TRY and when it is all said and done, hell, I’ve tried and you know what they say, “Better Late Than Never” which I suppose is one of my many life mottos.
The End (of that part of that story for now)
Well, if you're following along, you might see that I once again used various prompts from the week. It just seemed that once I had time to sit down with no other writing planned... I looked at the prompts and couldn't believe how well they all fit together for me. I set the timer for ten minutes and just wrote. I know, it's not five minutes, but it IS 5 days worth of prompts, so I think it'll do.
Thanks, as always, to @mariannewest for this crazy amazing (crazy-mazing?) freewriting adventure! Click any of the following links to see more of what this freewrite thing is all about (trust me, you should give it a look!)
Sunday Prompt: Describe the Wind or Palimpset
Monday Prompt: Yard Sale
Tuesday Prompt: California
Wednesday Prompt: Dream
And if you missed it, here is The story of how Freewriting made my steemit journey begin in the first place!
