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  Needless to say, I was a little irritated by the looming threat of unemployment. My senior year was here. I was running out of time. Who even decided it was your early twenties when you were supposed to have your career figured out? At twenty-one, I was still on my parents’ insurance, and I couldn’t be trusted to remember to feed my goldfish, Trey Leo. He was my third goldfish, and it’s not hard to guess what happened to Leo and Leo Jr.

  I wasn’t ready to lay my life out on paper. You can make all the plans in the world, but that doesn’t mean life is going to follow along with your bulleted timeline. Apparently, I should have been spending my time gaining life experience, planting metaphorical seeds to build success. A part of me had taken up arms to defend myself. My measly twenty-one years were nothing compared to the thousands of years this world has spun. It was just twenty-one years, right? Twenty-one years spent in school. It wasn’t like I was wasting the days away with no goals or responsibilities.

  The other part of me felt defenseless. I had no justification for my lack of experience. They weren’t exactly wrong. If Sherri and I were counting my days as pages, they’d all basically be blank. I’d taken the bulk of them for granted, filling them with meaningless mediocrity. I’d flipped through my college pages so fast they might as well have been empty. The threat of more wasted time was stacking up next to the anxiety that nestled in my stomach thinking about post-graduation unemployment, and that anxiety was making it hard to fully ignore that I was supposed to be an adult, or at least working on being one. As a senior, there was this unspoken pressure to have your life figured out. I wasn’t even totally sure what that meant, only that I should be doing it.

  Instead, I’d spent my college years existing. Merely existing. Barely existing. Living in the shadows. I’d spent the last three years not expanding my horizons, not seizing the day. I’d made a home inside my comfort zone, like most people, I supposed, refusing to break the barriers, content to avoid the anxiety of stepping out. There is a reason it’s called a comfort zone—getting out is so uncomfortable.

  My life so far was only filled with pages of illegible scribble and forgotten words. The sun was rising over the header, and the sunset flowed off the bottom margin, but everything in between wasn’t worth writing down. Up to this point, I had filled my pages with mundane day-to-day responsibilities, not excitement and passion. Priorities got in the way of living. The only hope I had to battle the anxiety was the knowledge that even if all my pages before were blank, they weren’t finished. I still had pages left, and these pages I could fill however I wanted to.

  CHAPTER 4

  MY ADVANCED JOURNALISM I class had been eerily uneventful the first month of classes, so I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Dr. Rodgers came in smiling from ear to ear with mischief. His elbow patches were basically grinning at me.

  “Time for project one!” he said with too much enthusiasm to be talking to a room full of hungover nerds. A collective groan rang out in the small auditorium. “Yes, yes! I know! Work! How dare I give assignments in college! The horror!” He snickered at his own joke.

  The class was not so easily amused.

  “This will hopefully be an eye-opening assignment. We’re going to do self-articles, like a self-portrait,” he explained. “In journalism, we’re always defining our subjects. We take who they are and we shine on it a certain light or tilt it toward a certain darkness to expose what we want the audience to take away from the article, and now we’re going to do that with our own lives. You’re going to define yourself.” He was talking entirely too fast, giddy with excitement. It was almost contagious—almost.

  The girl beside me snorted too loudly behind her coffee cup.

  “One thousand words. Due Friday after next, uploaded online. Don’t sugarcoat. Don’t water down. Just you. Real, people. Let’s do real.” He clapped his hands with such enjoyment, I had the urge to groan out loud.

  Did we even know what real was anymore? Journalism was constantly skewing reality. Our culture spends a great deal of effort convincing us we have to tear others down to build ourselves higher. Society is unyielding in its ability to make us feel inadequate. Journalism is a far cry from real. Was I supposed to showcase my good or broadcast my bad? Which was real?

  This assignment was going to take me forever. I didn’t even know how to begin. Isn’t the point of college to find out who we are? Granted, I was a senior, but I still felt like I had seven months to decide who I was. They couldn’t take away that seven months. I needed it. I was depending on it.

  How was I supposed to write a thousand words on who I was when I had no idea who that was? My name is Lex. I’m a hot mess. Eight words down, nine hundred and ninety-two to go—nine hundred and ninety-one if I broke out the contraction, which I was sure I’d be doing by the end of the assignment.

  Jules had watched me pull my hair out for an hour before she was worried enough to ask. We’d been spending most of our afternoons together due to her unusual lack of a steady boyfriend. Even with our increased study time, my focus on school seemed to be diminishing rapidly.

  “A penny for your thoughts?” she asked when premature balding was becoming a possibility.

  “My life is boring, and I’m a nobody.” Leave it to a journalism assignment to make me self-conscious.

  “You are not a nobody,” she scoffed. “You’re you.”

  There I was trying to write a thousand words about who I was, and she seemed to do it in two.

  “Care to expand on that, please? Perhaps with another nine hundred and ninety-eight more words?” I asked in my sweetest voice. It sounded a little sarcastic.

  “You’re Lex Baxter—Lex Noelynn Baxter, since we’re going for word count here. Senior. Aquarius. Wordsmith extraordinaire. Maker of excellent macaroni and cheese. You know, the important stuff.”

  “Macaroni and cheese falls into the category of important stuff?” I half laughed. I had perfected the three-for-a-dollar box of macaroni and cheese.

  “Yep. And you write for the paper—that’s important.”

  “You mean the one students flip through casually while waiting in line at the campus coffee shop and then leave as litter on the quad?” Her frown told me she must have never paid close attention to the reading habits on campus since she read my articles out of blind, best friend support for me.

  I closed my laptop with a sigh. I wasn’t coming up with any answers staring at an unchanging screen. My brain was so cluttered with characteristics and flaws, inadequacy and pride, I couldn’t concentrate. Searching for the words that could describe me, I found myself at the small park nestled across the street from Lola’s.

  After deciding two slow circles around the paved trail counted as my monthly exercise, I took a seat on the lone park bench under the hanging branches of an old oak tree. Still struggling with defining myself, I focused on the lives of other people, hoping it would provide some clarity on my own. People watching could either give me insight or turn my already present insecurities into unstable vulnerability. With the deadline looming over me, it was a chance I’d have to take.

  My concentration was fixated on a couple holding hands along the walking trail. They looked deliriously happy, never letting go of each other at their leisurely pace. Honeymooners. They were very clearly in love. Leave it to my subconscious to point out a craving of mine that I refused to give space in my mind. My lack of a love connection was not something I wanted to dwell on unless I planned to binge-eat a tub of ice cream and watch some tear-provoking romances late into the night.

  A lone jogger passed them, thankfully grabbing my attention, sweating profusely under the hot sun. He was in a hurry, whether trying to keep his heart rate up for a maximum workout or because he had somewhere to be, I wasn’t sure. He rushed along the path, not bothering to take in his surroundings. That was more my personality than the lovebirds: rushed, muddled thoughts and really messy hair. I could probably write at least two hundred words on my frizzy hair. It was a sore spot of
my morning routine.

  The park was still pretty full for late September. A dad pushed his pigtailed daughter on the swing set as she smiled bright and insisted on going higher and higher. A young boy slowly swept his metal detector across patches of grass, hoping for buried treasure. Three kites were being flown in the wind, ducks waddled into the small pond, and a pickup game had started on the weathered, graffiti-filled court.

  An older gentleman had taken the spot beside me while I dived into the lives of strangers, trying to compare them to my own. He smiled to himself as he threw crumbled bread to the gathering ducks. I knew I’d seen him there before when I used to frequent the park more, usually to jog when I got the urge to fit into my skinny jeans. He was always alone, always moving slowly and leaning heavily on his wooden cane.

  “Beautiful afternoon,” he commented with a crinkled smile in my direction.

  “It is.” I smiled, taking the crumbled bread he offered me to feed the hungry ducks.

  “Too rainy yesterday. Couldn’t come out.”

  “Do you come here every day?” I asked him, smiling at his affection for the ducks.

  “Most every day, I make it out here. The ducks are getting spoiled.” He chuckled to himself, making my smile grow. “Probably seems weird to a young girl like you, but we all fill our days differently.”

  Just like we all fill our pages differently.

  “I wouldn’t mind spending more of my days feeding the ducks,” I said honestly.

  “At least at this age, I get to do what I want,” he continued. “If I only had the energy.” A haggard sigh escaped his mouth. I felt it deep inside of me.

  “I have the energy. I just don’t have the time,” I said, almost under my breath. His hearing must have been pretty good for his age, or he had exceptional hearing aids turned up high.

  “It’s one of the crueler parts of life,” he said without turning to me. “If I’ve learned anything about time—or nothing, depending on how you look at it—it’s that it’s always going to be moving. There are a million ways to waste time, but I don’t think it’s usually doing the things people think. We waste time when we do anything that doesn’t make us happy. Our life is our story to choose, ours to make. We just have to find what we want and go for it.”

  On the old wooden bench, in the late afternoon soon, he made it seem easy. It really appears to be that simple, doesn’t it? Everyone has a story. We’re handed a beginning, we make the middle, and the end is the result. Some are longer than others, some are happier. The stories provide smiles or lessons or heartbreak. They’re all the same in that they’re all different.

  We’re all just human beings, doing our best, and I was no different. Just like the multitudes, I woke in the morning, did what needed to be done, and pushed aside anything that didn’t take precedence. Putting my pants on one leg at a time, filling my own blank page.

  That didn’t help me with the assignment, though. I could tell you things about me: labels, characteristics, even flaws. I could name a lot of flaws. I could put countless words on paper describing everything I wasn’t and never wanted to be, but who was I? What did I really want? I didn’t know if I could put that into words.

  I wanted to be able to divulge the inner working of my soul and not be embarrassed. I wanted to write. I want to share my thoughts, feelings, and ideas with the world and connect with other souls who mirrored mine. I wanted to spread inspiration in indelible ink and watch it stain us all.

  Sometimes I only understood myself when someone else put it into words. It wasn’t until I heard it come out of someone else’s mouth in a song, or a book, or a quote that I really got it. I wanted to do that for someone. I wanted to help them make sense of their world with my words.

  Sometimes words are just on a crumpled piece of paper, a hot pink sticky note, the back of a grocery list, or the corner of a bar napkin—but sometimes, they mean more. Sometimes, they are more, so much more.

  I wanted my words to make an impact, like a match sparking an explosion. Like a pebble skipped across a lake, I wanted to create rings that disrupted the still surface of the water and caused movement. They affect, and I wanted to do that. I wanted to affect.

  I wanted other things, too. I wanted to be a wife and mother, preferably in that order when the time was right and the hand I was dealt included a king. I was willing to take the bet. I wanted someone to love, someone to love me, to drink me up like a glass of red wine, throw me back like a shot of tequila, inhale my aroma like a big steaming mug of hot chocolate, savor my flavor like that first sip of coffee in the morning. I wanted to be all those things to someone. I wanted to be loved.

  Was that too much to ask for? Was it too much to want a dream job and a perfect love? Can you have both? Or does one have to give in order to obtain the other? Was it too much to hope to look into someone else’s eyes and know that even when your flaws are admitted, it won’t diminish their love for you? That comfort is scarcely felt in the judgmental world of college dating. One person easily replaces another. When a flaw too big appears, another conquest is sought, until another flaw arises, moving in a continual circle of search and seizure, and then tire and discard.

  The things I wanted to be were endless. I could have easily written a thousand words on my future self. Who am I right now? I couldn’t come up with anything. Every word my fingers typed on my keyboard fell short. Did I really know who I was? Had I lost myself somewhere along the way?

  I’m Lex Noelynn Baxter. Simple enough. I’m a twenty-one-year-old woman, a senior in college. I am an Aquarius, and I do make mouthwatering macaroni and cheese. I’m also a daughter and a granddaughter. I’m a friend. I had all these titles, but beyond them? I didn’t know. Labels are the easy part, superficial. They’re all surface words. It’s only between the labels that you can find true definition, and I was having a hard time seeing through the cracks of my self-applied labels.

  “I don’t really know what I want,” I said aloud, more to myself than to my older companion. “Don’t really know who I am,” I said even quieter. He looked like he knew a thing or two about life, if that sort of thing was measured in wrinkly smiles and gray hair. “How do you know who you are?” I asked him.

  “We take our heart’s desires and build who we are,” he told me with complete confidence. “It’s forever changing, hopefully growing.” He said it more to the wind than to me, probably knowing he would scare me off if he talked directly to me. “No matter how old you are, it’s not an easy route to self-identification, and the words can only go so far.”

  Maybe that was the point of the assignment. Maybe words can only explain so much. Maybe they can’t infiltrate who you really are. Maybe I was just a work in progress. Could I write one thousand words on that?

  CHAPTER 5

  I WOKE UP early Friday morning, too early. Mercifully, my senior year did not include Friday classes, so there was really no reason for my eyes to open before ten. Typically, on days I was spared early morning lectures, I spent that wonderful twenty-four hours ignoring all mandatory to-dos and focusing solely on doing things that made me happy—in other words, coffee, snuggly pajamas, and all-day napping.

  I crawled out of bed only to make my way down the hall, fall onto the couch, and doze off again. This time I was awakened by keys turning in the dead bolt.

  Jules even did the walk of shame well. There was humor in it. Her shirt was wrinkled. Her eye makeup had run down her cheeks a little, and her black, five-inch heels were in her hand. Even though it wasn’t her usual put-together self, she was still beautiful, like she’d been aiming for the ‘just woke up’ look. I hated her, in an ‘I love her’ sort of way.

  I could see the sadness in it, though, no matter how strong her facade was. “How was your night?” I asked when she noticed me awake.

  “It was fantastic,” she said, and then she spent the next twenty minutes recounting the amazing night that had sent them both spiraling into bliss. I knew she was exaggerating. She always exag
gerated her dates, if this could even be considered a date.

  What I took from the story was that they’d fumbled around in the dark, groping each other in a drunken haze, and passed out, too drunk to care about consequences and responsibility.

  Not a task that made it onto my senior year to-do list.

  “Don’t forget we are having lunch with Taylor today,” I reminded her, dragging myself to one side of the couch so she could crawl under the covers beside me.

  “What time?” she asked, her eyes still closed. It was important for roommates to share common interests, and looking at Jules right then, fighting sleep, I laughed knowing we’d always had that in common. Naps were an everyday occurrence in our household. Fluffy pillows stayed on the couch at all times, and pajamas were more like a dress code.

  “In two hours.” I went to shower, knowing if Jules went first, she’d use all the hot water trying to wash off the cologne smell from her skin.

  Taylor was one of my closest friends. I met her my sophomore year of college in a humanities elective class where we bonded over the mutual dislike of our classmates. The last two years she’d occupied the third bedroom in our apartment, but since she had graduated the previous spring, she’d moved an hour and a half north to Bricksburg. She now lived with her boyfriend, Clayton, and only returned to campus on Fridays to work toward completing a master’s degree.

  One of the hardest thing about my senior year, besides trying to plan my future, was missing Taylor. Transitioning from seeing someone every day to only seeing them for an hour one day a week was a blow to my already low desire to be social. I was having friend withdrawals. I couldn’t imagine what it’s like for drug addicts desiring that chemical pick-me-up, but they had nothing on Taylor. Her delight for life bled into all things, and for the last couple of years, I had been an abuser.