If only

I travel back 20 years sometimes, to find my teenage self. She was so thin, yet and half my current size, she believed herself morbidly obese. She spent all her daylight clowning and chattering, frantically hiding the misery that fell when everyone was asleep; the gasping and clutching of sleepless hours of panic and self-injury and the soothing plotting of the end of my life.
School's not easy with the screaming in your brain drowning out everything else. That's certainly not the only reason I was terrible at school; even with the benefit of drugs, I'm a world champion slack artist. Still, I've spent a lot of years wondering what if and what if and what if.

It's actually not that I'm not super happy with my life. I'm an English major with a job in her field - I'm living the dream. And if not for all the stumbles and falls, I'd have never met Jeremy. But haunted by the what ifs, I decided it was time.
This July I start in an MFA program at Ashland University. An MFA's not exactly the most practical thing to pursue, but it's not about finding a different job or making more money. It's about finding out what if.