I always do this. We’ll be at the movies or the supermarket or on the train or out to dinner and I just drift away. Eddie is holding my hand or he has his arms around my shoulders or he’s looking me right in the eye and I’m just not there. I try not to be vacant. Sometimes I can’t help it. The present, while fleeting, is so very boring. I much prefer to look out beyond our circumstances in hopes that there will be a brighter tomorrow.

I feel like that brighter tomorrow is always just out of reach. I like to imagine myself skinnier, stronger, more beautiful. I have long, thick hair and am dressed tastefully yet chic. Sometimes I am speaking clearly, standing my ground with the cleverness that only comes after my confrontations end. In my mind, I’m always clever just at the right moment. In my mind, I’m always ON. Lately, when I look in the mirror, the woman I wish I was is layered over the woman that I am. It’s becoming difficult to differentiate between the two of us and I don’t know if I should be worried or if this is normal.

I grew up in middle class America which means, as a white person, I’ve lead a safe existence. While my sisters and friends combatted the boredom that comes with that security with drugs, alcohol, and promiscuity, I was afraid. I’ve always been afraid of living life on the edge and getting caught or hurt. I don’t know how to rebel and I wish I did. Instead, I would spend my evenings and weekends on the floor in my bedroom, hiding under my sheet fort with my Girl Scout lantern, listening to music and dreaming about living their experiences.

In my wonderings, I explored drug use—by reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and listening to Pink Floyd. I explored sensuality and sexuality—by reading the Penthouse magazines my brother kept in his sock drawer and imagining what it must feel like for my body to quiver with a man’s touch. I learned about love and strength by reading Jane Austen and imagining myself as the heroines. But I wasn’t really living.

I hoped this dream world would go away by the time I went to college. I fantasized that I’d meet the people I was destined to know and that we’d be like-minded and that we would embark on the lifelong journey of friendship and love. I dreamed that going away to college was the thing that I needed to become the woman I was meant to be. I’d be going to a new place where no one knew me. It was my opportunity to reinvent myself.

But it didn’t work like that. I was placed in an all girls’ dorm and rather than experiencing unity, I felt displaced. The atmosphere felt super-charged with sexuality that I wasn’t quite ready for. My roommate was named Rebekah. Her main goals were to join a sorority and sleep with every boy in our class. She walked through the halls of our dormitory stark naked. The freedom she expressed with her body was both unreal and exhilarating to me. I longed to be that free and forward, but I felt like I was trapped behind these big white barriers and I couldn’t find a way out.

So I started living vicariously through Rebekah. I returned to my fort, only this time it was a permanent set up under my bed. I raised the frame to its highest setting and placed my mattress beneath it. I made it up comfortably and lined it with curtains to keep the world out. On top of my bed frame lived my books. Rebekah would go out for the night and I would lie under my bed, imagining it was me who donned the sexy dress, high heels, and so much perfume. I could see myself looking through her eyes at the world, living the life of a woman who is comfortable with her body and its impulses. If she brought a man home, I’d pretend to be asleep and quietly listen, feeling his hands and mouth on my body.

The rest of my college career went like that, for the most part. We remained roommates and became best friends. Rebekah tried to coax me out of my shell and succeeded a few times. She got me to sleep on top of the bed and try to be part of the world. I felt acceptance from her that I hadn’t before, despite our differences. She wanted to keep being my roommate because I was nice, considerate, and tidy. I wanted to stay with her because I badly wanted to live her life.

Always afraid. We went to parties and had fun when I pretended to be more like her. I drank. I smoke pot. I had my first kiss, my first fingering, my first sexual encounter. I felt weird and wonderful and right and wrong and grounded. I thought maybe I was finally shedding my dream world.

We graduated. She went off to New York to find a job and I moved to Boston to attend Northeastern to get my PhD in American History. It was another opportunity to reinvent myself and take risks that I never had before, but I felt lost and out of control without Rebekah’s guidance. I was afraid. I didn’t know how to live a confident woman’s life without her guidance, which means I was never really confident to begin with. So I was back in my room, but not on the floor or under the bed. I spent night after night on my queen sized bed in the apartment I lived in by myself. I watched shows and movies on Netflix featuring strong, sexy women like Christina Yang, Fiona Gallagher, Sookie Stackhouse, and Sloan, using men, manipulating men, loving men, and I wished so much that they were me, that I was them. But I was me.

Then I met Eddie and everything changed. He sat next to me in my second year historical statistics course and I knew I was going to fall in love. When he sat near me, all the little hairs on my body stood up and I could feel his electricity. I studied and memorized his features. One day in class, he slipped his hand under the table and held my hand and I felt like I was going to die. I knew then what it meant to quiver at a man’s touch and I needed more.

We went out. We stayed in. We fell in love. We moved in together. The daydreams were at bay because every day was exciting. I was finally living.

But I’ve been slipping away lately. Maybe things have gone stagnant. I drift off and I see us standing atop a grassy hillside, so in love. He gets down on one knee and everyone I’ve ever known appears and they’re holding sunflowers and it’s like we’re in a sea of sunflowers and he’s declaring an undying love for me and asking for my hand in marriage and I go to say yes and then I’m back in the present and he’s holding my hand and eating popcorn and watching old episodes of The Office.

I look beyond and I see us dancing, twirling, floating amongst a crowd of our loved ones, laughing and radiant in the round stringed lights, never letting go of each other and our joy and I snap back to reality and the hot water in the shower has run cold.

I feel like I am dangerously close to living a parallel life—dream world and reality coexisting. I fear I will forever be caught between them, going through the motions and dreaming of something better. I wish it would stop.