For me, there has always been a fine line between good and bad. When I look at the world I don’t see black and white, I just see a whole lot of gray. Some people think they can fix the way I look at the world. Like if they give me the right pair of glasses, I’ll suddenly see things differently. My mother, she’s been forcing these glasses on me since I was five. Apparently when your fifth grade teacher asks you where you want to live when you grow up, in a car is the wrong answer. My poor mother thought something was wrong with me. How could her precious daughter aspire only to live in a car? For a woman who enjoys her Sunday tea with a side of pearls, my lack of interest in the finer life horrified my mother. And if I’m being honest, I think it scared her a little too. That’s why, starting my sixth grade year, my precious mother decided to lock me up in a boarding school.
At boarding school, my life followed a dull, regimented pattern. Each morning, I woke up, brushed my teeth, curled my hair, put on a single swipe of mascara (because a true lady will wear no more and no less than a single swipe) and dressed in my stiffly starched uniform. The uniform was my favorite part of boarding school. Not the idea of the uniform, because to me wearing a uniform epitomized everything I despised about boarding school, but rather the uniform’s color. Our uniforms at boarding school were a deep blue. The color reminded me of midnight; it represented that subtle balance between day and night, light and dark, life and death. At boarding school, I fell in love with the idea of midnight.
I started to suffocate at boarding school. The stone hallways began to close in on me. The endless lectures and rules overwhelmed me. When the suffocation became too much, I left. I left boarding school at midnight. I was seventeen. I didn’t know where to go. I had no money. I only had my blue uniform and a deathly case of wanderlust.
I spent that first night curled beneath the old branches of an oak tree only a mile from the school. When I woke up the next morning my uniform was soaked with dew and my thick brown hair was freckled with debris. My back ached from a night of sleeping on the hard earth and I was so hungry my stomach had begun to eat itself. But I was free. I remember breathing in the warm spring air on that beautiful morning and feeling alive. In that exact moment, I started living.
Now I’m fifty-two and I’m lying in a hospital bed staring at the ceiling. They told me that I have an advanced form of lung cancer. I’ll probably die in a month, two if I’m lucky. My mother died of lung cancer a few years ago. Its funny when I think about it. My mother and I lived in completely different worlds. Lung cancer was the only thing strong enough to bring our worlds together. My friends stop by and visit occasionally. They tell me how sorry they are. All my friends think I’m dying. And I am. But I’m also living. What’s the difference between living and dying anyway? Everyone is dying. I remember my school uniform from all those years ago. I picture that beautiful midnight color. Midnight is the balance between night and day, light and dark, life and death. I have finally found midnight. After all those years of searching, I finally found the beautiful balance. I may be dying, but I’ll never stop living.