California

Prompt: What was your big dream for yourself when you were 18 and had graduated from high school?

Something in me was saying "California."  It's nothing mysterious.  It was simply being young and into Counting Crows.  They just made it sound like the place to be.  In the midst of the depressing break ups, the nightmare filled sleeping, and just the overall loneliness of life, California was the one bright light in Duritz's lyrics.  

It was far away, California.  Not that I had anything to run from.  At 18, I had my life ahead of me, and it was looking pretty good.  I was headed to school at Purdue, to study History and English in preparation for law school.  My aspirations were torn between working in prosecution or civil rights, mainly because my scope of the law was so small that I didn't know what else there was out there to do.  It was only later, through life experience, that I realized there are other parts of the system that would allow me to not defend scumbags.  Like family law, for instance.  Working on adoptions.  Or contract law, as well.

But anyway, at 18 I was not running from anything.  I just wanted to experience a daily dose of palm trees and the beach.  I just wanted to know what it would be like to be somewhere that had health food stores bigger than my local grocery (this was before Trader Joe's was a household name in the mid-west - not that I've ever been to one).

 There was something almost foreign about California to a girl that grew up in icy winters (sans real snow, of course) and frizzy-hair-humid summers.  It was like going to a new country where they speak my language.  

I didn't quite have life figured out past the point of being in California.  I didn't know what daily life would look like, whether I would enjoy my job or meet a man and start a family.  I just saw easy living and laid back healing... the kind that comes after long Decembers.