While You Were Pretending

Okay, there are three things I remember about my childhood, I just don’t remember it being so important. First, I would be with my parents, and my mom would get this far-off look and say: “Life doesn’t always turn out as you planned.” (I wished I realized she was talking about my life.) But that wouldn’t stop the three of us from going on adventures. We’d pack up the van or buy train tickets, only a handful of times did we fly. All the while, my parents would tell me of all the great and exotic places they’d been over the years, instilling upon me a deep-seated wanderlust. Some of my favorite memories, though, were when I had one-on-one time with my mom and she would tell me love stories of her and my father. The hopeless romantic in me would ask: “When did you really, truly know you were in love?” And she would answer, “When he gave me the world.” (At first just a Snowglobe, then their honeymoon gave her the first stamp in her passport.) The last piece of the puzzle was my best friend, Peyton. Only a couple houses down in our Chicago suburb, we’d been best friends our whole lives. Practically siblings, I really have two sets of parents. Any memory worth keeping had her as my partner in crime. Well… the first time I saw Her, she didn’t exactly give me the world. It was actually a Christmas cookie, even if it was two weeks until December 25th. I instantly looked forward to the rest of Winter break. She had come into town to see her family, (Peyton and her mother), and every time I got to see her was just perfect. It wasn’t exactly a fairytale meeting, but this is how things didn’t go as planned.