Your dreams will come true. 

I'm not sure which dreams, 

But they will come true. 

[fortune cookie]

Congratulations- you've made it. You lived to adulthood. You passed all the classes that mattered. You didn't need to cry all night when you got bumped from AP algebra to the regular algebra class in the eighth grade, convinced that you were dumb as a post and your future was irrevocably damaged. This has not mattered at all.

The boy you had a crush on in the seventh grade, who embarrassed you on the first day of junior high and ignored you ever afterward, turned out to have a metabolism that ground to a halt after 2007 and a manslaughter conviction. Your friends who perpetually teased and dyed their hair are now covering bald spots while your hair remains boring, but strong and present, much like the rest of you. You know now that there are worse ways to be.

There are no felonies to your name. You flossed enough that your teeth for the most part don't hurt. You did your taxes, you contribute to your retirement account, you found a cheap but reliable cell phone plan. Your mother is not at this time, as far as you know, disappointed in you.

You didn't marry the guy who chain-smoked American Spirits and said condescending and bizarre things that made you cry in restaurants. Instead, you married the man who woke up in the middle of the night when you turned over in bed, and automatically reached out to hold your hand. You both fell back asleep like that last night, the ridges of his callouses lightly scratching your palm.

Today at work, you spoke with a teenager who is about to have her first baby. She told you she had a question for you. Then she took a deep breath and said, When I have the baby, I'm allowed to hold him as much as I want, right?

Of course, you replied. As much as you want.

Okay, she exhaled. Then I will.

All that to say, it occurred to you today that your job is not perfect but it could be worse.

You have friends. Good, kind people. You keep your distance, but they share your sense of humor, they are interesting and warm. They are not small, selfish, or gratuitously cruel. You don't take this for granted.

You go one walks all over your little city with your husband and your dog and muse over the new coffee shop or the level of the creek that swirls past the park. Your mother-in-law brings over homemade soup in large glass jars when she worries you both eat too many burritos, and she is right to to worried. You are having more and more dreams about having a child.

And yet.

And yet you're up, typing this, at two in the morning, aren't you?

You made it. You're fine. You're better than fine- you're great. 

And if you're not, what then? If you want to scream, go ahead. No one will stop you, a grown woman in her own house. But no one is going to know what to do about it, either. The last time you screamed in your empty house, the dog watched you carefully for the rest of the afternoon, her expression unreadable.

It's not the biggest deal in the world. You're not going to kill yourself, or anything like that. Every time you even think about it, you imagine your husband finding you and that shuts that right down. The hungry bear in autumn knows what street you live on but is not circling your door. 

Some days, you feel like a person in the world. Some days, it isn't just a play where you remind yourself constantly how you used to feel about the people around you, how you should act, what a normal person would maybe do. Some days, when you park the car and sit in your driveway with your forehead against the wheel and lose track of time, you hear the car door open and feel your husband's arm around your back and then you are human again for a second, like a woman who gets to exist, like if you were missing someone would get up and look out the window.  

But it's true that if you had known about this earlier- the blank wall, the big nothing, the scream that lives permanently in your throat- you would not have bothered crying over the algebra class. You would have gotten up, closed your book, and walked out into the sun. 

Maybe it's not too late to do that, still.