Sundays we always wake up early to go to church then spend the rest of the day doing outdoor work or cleaning the house, or both, odds and ends that need to be done.  We have dinner Sunday nights with whatever kids can make it.  Mondays and Thursdays I do the grocery shopping, Tuesdays Henry has poker night, Wednesdays are book club, Fridays we generally go out with some couple or another and Saturdays we have together to stay home or go out.  Week in and week out.  Repeat until death.

As a teacher, the students are my only reprieve from the monotony, though even they follow a pattern.  Mondays everyone is languid, at best, and whines.  Tuesdays are… beige.  Wednesdays there’s a small amount of joy because the week’s half over.  Thursday there are finally a few smiles, and the students wake up enough just in time for… Friday.  Teenagers are near to unmanageable on Fridays.  They’re so relieved the week’s over that they’ll do almost anything to get out of doing work on Fridays and usually succeed.  After all, the teachers scarcely want to be there more than the students.  The only real difference is we get paid.

I don’t know how many times I’ve thanked God that I chose to be a theatre teacher.  Putting on shows is my salvation.  No production is the same and, hence, each one offers escape from my otherwise carbon copy days.  And with live theatre comes interesting kids. Misfits of all sorts are drawn to theatre.  Here is a place where they can act out and not be judged.  And they’re good kids.  Unfortunately, the average high school just doesn’t accommodate kids of advanced maturity, creative students or students that want to experience life fully.  It allows you to experience many lifetimes in one or learn skills, like light and stage design, that allow you to create atmosphere and manipulate mood.  Stage management gives teens responsibility at an age where no one trusts them with it yet.  I’m so blessed as a theatre director; I get to see my students at their brightest moments, functioning with pure teamwork and utmost concentration.  It’s beautiful.

But, with every rehearsal or performance comes its end.  I lock the theatre, turn off the light board, get into my sedan and drive home to my cookie cutter house in the neighborhood with perfectly manicured lawns and gardens.  Someday I’d like to let the garden go until the weeds are waist high and see what happens.  I wonder if a neighbor would come over and do the gardening for me.

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It was all so innocent when we started, which can possibly be attributed to our youthful naivety to the danger of learning another person’s mind before knowing them.  There is something so dangerous for people who are more interested in a person’s mind about knowing someone’s mind before their voice or before meeting them.  To learn their thoughts and dreams without them being clouded by inflections and facial expressions is perilous.  If you meet someone that way and find their thought process remotely appealing, you’re doomed.  Then, if you add a voice to the ideas, inflections, perhaps an accent, or vivid descriptions and stories, you’re done for.  To leave that on it’s own, maybe you could somehow work past it, with time and heartbreak.  However, if you’ve met the person, put a face and a smile and a visible laughter with the now familiar voice and attractive brain, and you’re hooked.  You add a human body, a scent, a presence to that, and you’ll never escape.  And all because you first knew them without the distractions of their existence because you first learned their landscape with no pretense or supposition.  That is the most dangerous way to love someone for people like me.

Anyway, she had responded to my message, and I to hers.  We immediately fell into comfortable joking, play fighting over an actress, calling each other names.  Irreverence was something we both enjoyed.  I was jolted by how much we had in common, how our beliefs aligned.  Our messaging flowed, and our wits and humor were equally matched.  It became apparent my apprehension about her maturity was completely unfounded.  She seemed to bring out my playfulness and proved to possess maturity far beyond her years, often causing me to forget she was five years younger than I.

Even with only messaging casually, our bond quickly formed, and soon a day didn’t go by when I neglected to store something away to message her with later.  We’d been going on this way for maybe a month and a half when I decided to progress our friendship.  I was blind to the necessitation of her in my daily life and somehow missed how much I looked forward to hearing from her.  As if the need for further contact wasn’t a big enough give away.

             I asked her for her screenname, and she willingly gave it, expressing excitement at the prospect of chatting with me.  I waited a week before I finally messaged her, trying and failing a handful of times, observing her away messages and reading and re-reading her profile in that week.  My tentativeness was new, something I’d never experienced before in any of my online interactions.  Maybe it was because I knew, even then, subconsciously, that this time was different, that this time I would be taken seriously and what I said would matter in the impression I left.  I cared.  It’s so easy to see all of that now.  Had I seen it then, the decision would have been clearer.