Don't Stop Believing

If it had been up to me, and if money had not been the elephant of an obstacle that it happened to be. I would be leaving town after graduation and shipping up to Boston. I don't really know what it was that drew me to the place, but I was infatuated with it. I had only spent two days there in my life, on a trip there with the Finnegans. It must have been love at first sight; completely impractical person to person, but person to city...of course. It had all of the artsy atmosphere that I liked about the Village in New York, but without the snobbish attitude. And there was something about the history intertwined with the city that made it far more interesting than anywhere else that I had ever found myself.
I’d go to some amazing liberal arts school learning how to pen the next American classic and live in a disheveled South End apartment surrounded by lively open-minded, artist types, dye my hair bright red or something, and be completely self-destructive like my literary heroes. I would spend my days writing away in some intellectual bookstore-slash-coffee shop and my nights hanging with musicians in little Irish Pubs. I wouldn’t have much, actually, hardly anything to my name, but by choice rather than chance. It would just be me, my cat, my writing, and the occasional tortured musician or penniless poet that may cross my path and sweep me off of my bare feet in the mean time.
Of course that wouldn’t continue forever. Eventually something of mine would pass under a publisher’s impressed eye and boxes of perfectly bound books would be rolling off the presses, my name emblazoned on the cover in those metallic gold raised letters and a deeply thoughtful black and white photograph of me on the back. I would be able to afford nearly anything I could possibly desire; a better place to live, one with a movie set spiral staircase and a library full of old books with those sliding little ladders, the completion of my Beatles’ record collection, and of course a closet fully stocked with beautiful shoes. Boston would be my home, but places like London and Dublin would begin to feel like a close replacement after a while. And I would be just as happy.
The only thing I hadn’t figured out was the company I’d keep. I liked the friends I had and I found it quite doubtful that given the near six-hundred thousand or so people that would be buzzing around me, none of them would come remotely close to what I had with my relationship with Finn…or what I wanted with Finn. A person like that only comes around once for a girl and to go running in the opposite direction seemed like flaw in my whole master plan.
The picture in my mother’s mind that was most associated with my best friend involved me and a white wedding dress. I didn’t see that per se, but I didn’t picture myself cutting him out of my life anytime soon. He was my best friend and I had assumed that it was in the cards that no matter what either of us did with our lives, whatever weird connection was between us would be enough to keep from losing each other completely. Our lives seemed to be impossibly intertwined from the very start and the more milestones we endured side by side, the more little strings that tethered us closer together. But our time was up. In a matter of days I would embark on the lovely eight hour drive in a packed car with my parents to move into college.