First Call

I remember well the day my real life ended. I was 25. I had been working at what I considered my first real job. Real because I wore a suit jacket and spent eight hours of my day in a grey cubicle.

I caught the train every day at 7:45. We all held onto overhead straps, as the car lurched and screeched through the Boston tunnels built in the 1800s. Luckily the lurching didn't matter, because we were packed so tightly there was no way to lose your balance.

Twenty minutes later we filed up the subway steps, into a minute of daylight. Then directly into our glass-doored office buildings, toting brown bag lunches and gym clothes.

Unless it was Friday, in which case our gym bags would contain dressy heels and a low cut blouse. Cosmopolitan magazine had taught us how to transition from day to night when there wouldn't be time to go home to shower and change — before going out to try to meet stock brokers with BMWs.

The last day of my real life was not a Friday but a Tuesday, so I went to the gym and then straight home. I stopped on the sidewalk and looked up at my apartment.

Most days as I got home, I thought how in a couple more years, if I kept up the good work in the cubicle, I could buy a starter condo. Then I wouldn't have to share with Ray and Carol, my current roommates. They weren't a public couple but a secret one — or so they thought — sneaking up to Ray's slanty-walled attic room to fuck.

Carol would never have been caught dead with Ray as a real boyfriend, because he wore flannel shirts even when he wasn't going camping. He would do, though, because she had no inner resourcefulness for battling her loneliness.

I knew this because she also clung to me, by initialing these weird girltalk-ish moments. It was easy to tell that she didn't really like me, but still there would be the awkward knocks on my bedroom door. She would ask if I had a minute. I was trying to act normal, so I'd invite her in and do my best as a fake best friend.

She came clean about Ray and his flannel shirts during one of these disconcerting teary chats with Carol as we pretended to be besties. I made her a cup of tea and leaned in for all the details — more than TMI.

As I stood outside that day, I was thinking how little I cared: about Carol, Ray, the kind of shirts men wear when they weren't camping — and any other thing I knew Carol would talk about when I went through that front door.

She lived for real gold jewelry, the Clinique counter at Macy's, and finding a well-suited man with whom she could buy a starter condo and begin building her life.

I don't know how long I stood before the front door that particular Tuesday, dreading opening it. I had always wished to want things the way Carol did.

If I were honest, though, I would have to admit that I wanted dirt roads and unfamiliar lands. I wanted food I'd never tasted and probably wouldn't like, and hot winds at night. I'll never know why it was that particular day that honesty delivered me the sucker punch.

My junior year in college, I'd been signed up for a semester abroad. It was in England where you didn't even have to learn a new language — except to know that sweaters would be jumpers and sneakers would be trainers. I still chickened out, though. I was afraid to miss something. I canceled the trip due to a kind of backwards FOMO which caused me to actually miss out on a new experience.

This was flashing through my mind as I stood paralized on my front steps — and realized that all I would have missed were dorm-room gossip sessions, potential for alcohol-induced coma at frat parties — and assuring my roommate she was not fat.

In that moment at my doorstep, I was missing a foreign place, its people, its winding streets and empty beaches. I could almost smell it. I didn't know its name and I had never been there. But I knew, almost crying now, that I had to go there or I might begin to die at 25.

This was the first calling of my soul that I remember. Like all lives, my mine has had its ups and downs. There have been more ups, though, than downs. I'm sure that's because I killed the life I'd mistaken for my real life, but that was actually Carol's.

I lived instead, the life of my own soul. And when the downs came, I knew they were lessons in disguise — because that's what happens when you choose the journey of spirit.

When I finally went into the apartment, I knew it wouldn't be my home for much longer. It took some finagling of paperwork and packing up my real life. Nine months from that day, though, I was wearing a flowered dress and boarding a plane to Washington DC. Three days after that I was sworn into the Peace Corps.

When I got to my final destination, it was all there as my heart had told me it would be: being packed into crowds and no strap to hold onto, and sharp syllables I didn't recognize. There were skewered pieces of animal turning on spits outside kiosks where you could also get a Coke.

You saw these stands on the sides of the roads as you reached the end of a lonely turnpike. They signaled the approach of the edge of the new town that would be your home for the next two years.

No one was named Carol or Ray.