ᴜɴᴇᴅɪᴛᴇᴅ ʟᴇᴛᴛᴇʀs ᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ʙᴏʏ ɪ ʟᴏᴠᴇ » ᴄᴏʀʙʏɴ ʙᴇssᴏɴ

pick

Pick what makes you happy.

That's what mom told me one morning when I couldn't sleep.

I was sitting up on the couch in the living room when she came in, exhausted from yet another day of preparing for auditions that would produce fruitless results.

She'd been acting since she was a child, was convinced by my age that it was her calling in life. She moved to L.A. without support or acceptance from her parents, began the process of landing a role in a show or musical.

Twenty years later, she was still stuck in the process, had been thrown around, taken advantage of because of her lack of success, always waiting, always working, always hoping that one day she'd get a phone call or an email and it would finally be time.

The wear of strung-out hope and inevitable disappointment over the years, however, had begun to show in the permanent bags under her eyes, the streaks of gray appearing in the roots of her hair, the shaking of her hands when she didn't get enough sleep. Her dream was her life, like work was mine.

She sunk into the couch next to me in the dark, asked why I was still awake. I'd told her about you in the past, and eventually revealed that you were the source of my unrest and unease. I didn't understand how you were changing my life so much, and I was utterly confused about what I was supposed to choose: attempting to turn down my feelings for you or free-falling and simply waiting to see what would unfold between us.

Mom told me to pick what made me happy because she didn't do that when she was my age. She chose the wrong man-my father. The wrong person who convinced her that she was happy, content with him, when she wasn't.

She told me to pick what made me happy, and I knew without a doubt that you had already won, that you'd done so within the first month we met.