She had always wanted to lead a safe life, until she realized how really boring safe really was. It was the creative writing class that drove the nail home. How could she write about angst when she didn’t have any? Most of the time she thought it was great to have a life where everything moved along smoothly and nothing bad ever happened, and it was, until she realized that she had missed out on having any really great or amazing experiences.

How could she write about being stalked, about being in dire financial crises, or even feeling as though her life was at risk, when those thing didn’t happen to her? They really did happen to somebody else; somebody she didn’t know.  No one in her circle of friends had been the victim of unusual, freaky or even wacky circumstances.

She had always rolled with the punches and had come out standing as she lightly dusted the dirt from her hands. The worst thing she had experienced was her divorce, and even that didn’t feel so bad now that it was ten years behind her. At the time it had felt like hell. She had even considered doing harm to herself, really seriously considered it, but the urge had passed. Such an idea was too selfish of an act for her to put into action. She believed it would have caused too much pain for the ones she left behind and not enough for the one she was trying to escape. So she had hung on and made it through the days, weeks and months that turned into two years of domestic warfare that eventually put an end to her emotionally abusive marriage. As John Mayer had sang, “When a heart breaks, it don’t break even.”

That was her life, so like the sweet romance songs she loved and the messages they carried. She was often impressed, if not amazed, at how well a current hit song would fit her situation in life, as if God and his angels, or perhaps the collective consciousness of the world, was speaking directly to her.

How could she hope to write creative, angst-filled, suspenseful fiction with such a mundane life? Why even bother? Who would want to read such dribble as the story of her life? Writing was supposed to be cathartic, a purging of your spiritual, mental or emotional demons. Except she didn’t feel she had anything to purge. For the most part, she believed life was good and she was blessed.

There had been moments, snatches of highs and lows, but they were the exception on an otherwise flat EKG of her life. The birth of her children, especially her first born, counted as a high, but every mother on earth shared some kind of similar experience.   Her pregnancies and deliveries had been relatively easy.  Going through a nasty and emotionally painful divorce was a low, but again not very unusual, especially in a society that racked up a fifty percent divorce rate.

She had no dark, long buried secrets to bite her on her ass or haunt her every waking hour.  She had always refused to hold onto stuff that created emotional baggage. Her life was more like a sieve; move on and let the dirt shift its way through the holes. She believed everything and everyone had their share of cracks. That was how the light got in and the dirt flowed out. And she did her best to keep the flow flowing.

Perhaps she should become a romance writer!