She walked in thinking to herself, ‘what am I doing here? There’s no reason for me to be here..’ but there was a reason for her to be there, whether she knew the reason herself or didn’t. It seemed like everyone else knew why she was there but they wouldn’t tell her or even give her a hint of why she was there. The room was draped in what seemed to be thoughts of the future but she couldn’t tell why there was so much emphasis on the future. She was a young lady that had her entire life ahead of her but wanted to just simply live in the moment. She didn’t like thinking about the future in fear of missing the joy in a present moment. She wanted nothing to do with retirement plans but rather was a more free spirit kind of person and just went where ever the wind blew her.
The people all around her seemed to be planning out the future without any hesitation. They were planning out next year internships, next seasons sporting events, even next week’s Friday night outing. All she wanted to think about was who she was hanging out with for the night. She wanted to be care free in the moment, but according to the others around her she must choose now what she would do with her time.
She grew up believing that the world was at her fingertips if only she would reach out and touch the unimaginable than it would all come true. Her Daddy had told her to reach for the stars and never look back on this place she had once called home. Her ‘home’ had many dark places that she didn’t want to remember. From all this darkness her Daddy pushed her towards the light which was anywhere but where she had grown up. He wanted her to grow up and be something, be more than he was or her mother was, he wanted the world for her and could only push her to be what she wanted to be. He had pushed her to be in this place where she was now. A place where people wore finely pressed suits, or at least they looked like suits. A place where they spoke at a higher intelligence level and if you weren’t on their level than you needed to go elsewhere because you weren’t going to make it in their group. She wanted to just go home. She didn’t care how dark her home was, it was her home and the only place she had ever known. But she also trusted her Daddy, and if he was pushing her to get her out of that place and onto a new life than she was going to trust him and follow where he pushed her to go.
As she sat down she looked for someone to sit next to her but then realized that the speaker had begun. Even the speaker was neatly pressed like he stepped out of a magazine they had just air brushed. She tried to ignore that and listen to what the speaker had to say, except for the people in front of her were only consumed with their personal conversation so that’s all she could hear at the moment. She decided to stand up in the back of the room, partly so she could hear and partly because the man at the podium had a voice like Charley Brown’s teacher and she had been traveling all night long so it was all she could do to stay awake.
She wondered when she could get out and meet people around the area because in this room there was only enough room to move when people stopped their judgmental stares and their deceitful lips from moving. Finally the speaker paused and what she thought would be her escape was actually her open door to the new world her Daddy had been pushing her towards. A lady by the name of Ms. Philange asked her to step outside, to which the girl responded timidly because she felt like she had done something wrong. Ms. Philange, only an inch taller than herself with dark circles under her eyes like she had been up since the 1800s, began to tell her she had seen her walk in and wanted to introduce herself. This woman was strange to the girl but she decided to go with it and give the lady a chance. As she spoke to the girl, all she could think about was the time that her kindergarten teacher brought in a guest speaker to talk about some fundraiser and it seemed as though she only acknowledged her out of the entire classroom. The girl got the feeling that she was no longer proceeding to her open door, rather she felt she was receding, and wished she really had been, back to the seat where the girls in front of her couldn’t stop spilling their guts about which cute guy they would talk to first.
Ms. Philange continued on about some blabber blabber about the facilities, to which the girl responded, “I’m sorry, am I supposed to be taking notes?” Ms. Philange gave the girl a look like she needed to learn some manners but the girl was being serious. Why was this lady talking to her like she was in first grade? She had been minding her own business and not bothering anyone. In actuality the girls in front of her should have been being talked to because they were the ones that really needed to be talked to. Just then another girl came up and screamed “Anna!!!” The girl just looked at her and decided to go along with it as she screamed back, “Jessica!! How great it is to see you??” She didn’t know the girl a day in her life but for some reason there was a sense of understanding her pain as she stood there and listened to Ms. Philange go on and on. The other girl began to tell Ms. Philange that she was so glad that she had found her friend she had been looking for all day and that she would take her from here and give her a proper tour of the facilities. Ms. Philange just stared aimlessly as the girls trotted off into the new world that the girls’ father had so badly longed for her to be a part of. This was finally the start that the girl had been searching for and she couldn’t wait to call her father and tell him every detail of the day, especially about the new world she had now discovered through his persistence of a better life for her.
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