It's one of those nights when I can't shut my brain off, can't keep myself from reflecting, even when I know some of the trails my mind is due to wander down are not good for me. I know it, yet, tonight, it seems as if it's the only way. Shall we?

Five years ago today, I graduated from high school. I stood outside my high school for the last time with my high school boyfriend, said good-bye to my first real boyfriend, and was waved at by my estranged best friend's family from their mini-van. Wow, I had thought to myself. Things have certainly changed.

There is a quote from one of my favorite writers, Thomas Lynch. He is reflecting on life, on the had-I -known-then-what-I-know-now moments. He says, "In my fifties, I imagine the man in his twenties, who never could have imagined me." That quote makes me feel two things. First, I feel hopeful. I think about being fifty, and how wonderful I might be, how great life might have turned out, and how I can't imagine it now, in my twenties. I hope the fifty year old Mar is saying to twenty-something Mar, Just around the corner is something wonderful, if you could just wait long enough.

But then I think, what if I don't become a wonderful person by my fifties? What if I look back on my twenties thinking, What happened to her...? I can't bear that. I can't. So I guess I'll go about the business of creating the former.

Life is so good right now. But, in typical Catholic Irish fashion, that just means I'm waiting for the inevitable horror, the tragedy to ruin it all. The longer I go without that happening, the higher the stakes, the scarier the downfall. Perhaps it's scarier, this time, coming from what felt like rock bottom to me. August-February were the hardest months of my life. I don't think I have ever felt so many things at once, to such staggering extremes, for so long. It really was painful. My entire life changed. Now that things are evening out, I can breathe a sigh of relief, but also fear a return to the bottom. I don't want to go back. I don't want to feel hopeless like that again.

Positive changes, as of late: I met one of the most amazing men, and, oddly, he enjoys my company too. I'm not offering that as a happy ending, a Cinderella moment, but, as a happy beginning, as an acknowledgement that yes, fine, I will concede that not all humans are awful and that I want to be in close proximity to some of them. I welcome it. In other more life-changing, and I mean that, banter, I got a new job that pays, literally, twice what I made at my last job. This means paying all of the bills, and on time, and not having to sell my home, which was about to happen. It means keeping my dog, feeding him and myself, and having a little extra money to enjoy life too. I am sticking my toe in the water, trying new things. I'm smiling a lot.

I'm remembering that evening, five years ago, when I couldn't possibly imagine that five years from that very moment the high school boyfriend next to me would be my ex-husband; that my mother and I would actually have a relationship; that I would be a single woman who owns her own home in Chicago, filling it with books and dog hair and attempts at cooking. I couldn't imagine feeling the sadness I just overcame, nor the strange freedom and elation I feel now.

I would have been shocked to know what friends stuck with me through it all. People I would have guaranteed to have been there are not, and people who were mere acquaintances, or not even known to me yet, have carried me through. I blink. I stare. I blink again. Is this my life? Is this me? Is this the woman in her twenties, imagining the girl in her teens, who never could have imagined me?

I guess it is. Here I am.