No Alibi

I’ve taken a lot of time off from school and other goals, to the point of developing a stagnant life. I look back over the past 10 years, and there is nothing that I’m proud of. It used to make me itch. Now I think it’s infected.

It’s not even like I have a good excuse for putting my life on hold. I wasn’t seduced by a double talking, snake charming salesman in tight, pinstriped pants with well-oiled moustaches and the face of an angel, who left me alone and pregnant to fend for myself on the Mean Streets, where it’s perpetually winter (except when it’s sticky-August), without so much as a bootstrap by which to pull myself up.

It’s not as if I lived with my parents in some forgotten armpit of America where crystal meth abounds until they died and left me to raise 7 dirty, barefoot siblings and to pay the debt on our farm, held by an evil-uncle landlord with a pedophiliac gleam in his puss encrusted eye.

It’s not like I broke all my bones and fell into depression, requiring years of physical and psychological therapy. I haven’t been doing odd jobs and hard drugs while trying to “make it” as an actor. I was neither kidnapped nor sold into prostitution. I was not called upon to avenge anyone’s untimely and unjust death. I have not been on walkabout. I’ve had no TARDIS adventures. I was not waylaid by love, and I have not been too busy as a wife and mother to bother with the dreams of my youth. There have been no Ponzi schemes, gypsy curses, or felony convictions to slow me down. I’ve never been lost in a jungle, lost at sea, or lost on a foreign planet. I didn’t spend any time in a mental hospital, rehab, witness protection, a haunted circus, or an enchanted garden labyrinth.

It’s not as if an alien parasite attached itself to my brain, rendering me useless so it could feed on all my would-have-beens until a chance encounter with the perfect, random combination of ordinary chemicals killed the unwelcome guest and broke his hold over me but left me unharmed (at least I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen).

It’s not as if I died.

It’s not as if I didn’t know better.

I just stopped. I let myself stop, always meaning to start again, but taking longer than intended to do it. After one part of my life slowed and stopped, bit by bit, so did everything else.