Plans

I didn’t plan for any of this. I certainly didn’t dream for it. I didn’t spend my childhood daydreams thinking that this future would be waiting for me. And yet, if not since childhood, then at least for years, it has been building up, gathering itself in the darkness beneath the flesh, working itself up to its moment.

Its moment came three weeks ago, when I sat in that small room, noticing all its details, letting the words wash over me, not porous enough to absorb them.

#

I wake up in the night and I wrap the Diagnosis around me. I try it on for size. I wear it like a big, multi-coloured, furry, velvet-lined coat. I wear it like that one item in your wardrobe that you can’t let go of, and know you’ll have and wear – if only occasionally – pretty much for life. I see myself in the mirror in it. I twirl, I turn. I try to acclimatise to this new, unimagined me. And when I dare to, I squint my eyes, I try to see a little way into the future, just testing the darkness, seeing how much I think I can take.

It doesn’t matter, really, of course, because I’m going to have to take it whether I want to or not. Leaving it isn’t an option.

#

I did have plans of course.

There were those days in preschool when I imagined I was going to be a nurse. Or half a year later when I saw the girl in make-up section, and I thought there could be nothing more exciting than to be a shop assistant as beautiful as she was. I had plans to build that tree-house: which I did. And plans to be dating Nigel Lockart from camp before I turned thirteen: which I didn’t manage, and I don’t know to this day if that could ever have been an option.

I would go to university.

I would complete my degree.

I was going to work in fashion, become a designer. I was working towards that. I’d helped out at that conference, and at the local theatre. A week before the Diagnosis, I’d had that interview.

Well, none of that matters now.

#

There’s a little girl. A tiny blond creature in a pink dress and bare feet who runs around the kitchen whooping and giggling, making the noise of six children, wanting her toenails painted but without the patience to sit still while they get done.

She isn’t real.

She’s part of the fantasy. She comes with a little boy who’s just as loud, but odd and quirky, wearing glasses and loving dinosaurs, and collecting leaves and pebbles to build parks for his plastic dinosaurs.

They were always a part of my future.

But I guess that isn’t going to happen now.

#

Poor Lachlan.

He had plans too. He had plans for two. For me and him. I can’t say that I know for sure, but I think he imagined those plans to involve world travel, walking and working the world together, immersing ourselves in other cultures, and in each other. Just as soon as he finishes his degree and saves up a bit. And then, in one of those faraway, foreign destinations, his plans were going to involve a ring. A secluded spot where there’s long grass and flowers, preferably a waterfall, at least a running river. And he’d reach into the inner pocket of his jacket and pull out that little box, opening it to reveal the glint of that ring.

A white dress.

A picket fence.

That little boy and girl. It all factored into his plans as well.

At least it did.

#

But here’s the thing: me and Lachlan.

That part of the plan had already gone askew. At least to my way of thinking. I was planning an exit. Well, maybe not planning, but kind of toying with, twisting it around in my head a bit to see how it felt. Testing the loneliness. Going away for a few days to see how it felt to not be with him. I guess I know I should have been trying to find a way to re-ignite the spark instead; but it was more than just a doused fire. There were all those little things, those niggling little tiny unassuming… but then you multiply that by fifty years and suddenly…Those little disagreements that were only cracks now, but would one day become wedges.

And so the plan was forming. And another plan: after the dust had settled, after it was, you know, decent, I would have moved on to Part B of that plan: running into Mike Hanson at the chip shop, walking home with him, trying on a bit of flirting to see how he might take it.

But I guess that’s not going to happen now either.

#

And Lachlan.

Well, I need him. He came in with breakfast in bed yesterday morning. He had a single rose in a vase – well, an empty Coke can, masquerading as a vase – and he was purposefully chirpy. He piled on the scones and fruit and scrambled eggs, and flung the curtains open to let in the sun. He made it feel like the first day of the rest of our lives, as if we were on an upwards trajectory and not downwards. I need to feed off that optimism, otherwise I think I might starve.

I tell him I want to go outside for a while, eat on the patio. I want to absorb some of that sunlight. While we eat, I talk about maybe going to the beach today, maybe going for a walk to that ice-cream parlour the way we used to, getting one of those old-fashioned sundaes.

Lachlan says, “sure,” with enthusiasm, though I know he’d have agreed to anything I said.

I’m lucky, I guess.

“Let’s do it,” says Lachlan.

It’s a plan of a sort, I suppose.

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work