Kimberly

      I know a woman by the name of Kimberly. She was my small group leader in church back in high school. She was 25, self-riteous and always told me to do the right thing. She believed that I always did because she had never stepped a toe out of line in her life. She lives a very short distance from the house in which she grew up, she went to college only an hour away from the town in which she grew up and she has never left the nest of her comfortable little bubble. She tattled on the girls on her cheerleading team when they drank at a party, she didn't touch a drink until she was 21 and drugs of any sort were completely out of her sight and mind. She even tried to make it work when her college boyfriend of four years cheated on her and gave her herpes, yes I'm serious. Her current life goal is to get married, have a couple kids, eat, shit and die.
      Now, six years later, I met her for coffee last night. I ooh-ed and ahh-ed at all the right moments when she showed me her new, shiny engagement ring and told me all about how he proposed but I noticed something different about her and it wasn't a nice bride-ly glow. The second that ring, and that life, hit her finger she ceased to care about anything to do with we mere single women. Once we had exhausted every last excruciating (for me) detail of her new rock the conversation turned to my life, "So what's new with you?!" Kimberly asked with wedding dress shaped stars in her eyes. I told her about what was going on in my life, like she had asked, and I was barely met with passing interest! Evidently my life out in the dating world had become something to be pitied, like I would find happiness one day when I would grow up and get a shiny rock and a piece of paper like hers. When did ownership of a man become the thing that separates the girls from the women? All of a sudden I felt childish talking about my dating hits and misses. Sitting on an overstuffed velvet chair in Starbucks I realized that Kimberly was now too good to spend precious time away from the stove with her lowly, single girl friends. Casey was there with me and she saved the conversation most of the night. I really do owe her this time, she really saved me from myself.
      Maybe I'm being too harsh. Kimberly did take interest in one thing I had to say, I told her that I've decided to move, far away. This is what I heard,
                    "Oh my god that's crazy! You're going to have so much fun! I'm not too worried about losing you though, you'll be back. This is the best place to raise kids."
       Alright, I'll put the assumption that kids are either a goal or a priority on the back burner for now and simply address the idea that she thinks I'm coming back. She went on to talk about how much fun I'm going to have in my new city before I come back here to get married. It was like she was re-assuring me that one day I too would find a man and get married like her. Problem one: Because she thinks the world is a big bad place, she is predicting my apparently evident failure. Not that I think she knows me at all but I thought she would be smart enough to know that I am not made of glass. Problem two: She assumes, and predicts, that I want nothing more in this life than a man, house and life like hers.
      Here's what I didn't say to Kimberly. I didn't have the heart to tell her that sooner or later, she would wish she had gone out and lived a life like mine. I'm going to move away and forget all about her in her domestic glory. I am going to look back fondly on the years we spent chatting our single follies away and end the memory with yea, I haven't heard from her in a while, she got married and we fell out of touch. Kimberly is going to live vicariously through the post cards and emails I'll send her for a couple years while her life turns into a colorless, humdrum string of parent teacher conferences and marriage councilors. These were thoughts I kept to myself. While she sat in her high horse chair telling me all about how not worried she was about me finding a husband, I sat and thought about all the things I was going to let her learn on her own all on her own.