Sometimes, choices can make you feel really, really good.
The choice can lead to the sort of good that makes you want to frolic around hillsides in Austria. Feel the warm wind as it whips through your hair with the fragrance of alpine roses tickling your senses while Julia Andrews leads you in a euphoric tune dedicated to your favorite things.
Sometimes, a choice is less like a Disney song and more like the first fizzling note of a fresh bottle of Dr. Pepper. It’s the building of the bottle’s chilling condensation on your fingertips as you respite underneath the heat of a blazing summer sun.
It’s the feeling of that cold liquid sliding down my throat and tracking the sensation as it slips through my body and settles somewhere low.
Have I had fantasies about Dr. Pepper? You bet.
I mean, if it’s a choice between the reenactment of The Sound of Music or a bottle of Dr. Pepper, what choice do you think I’d make?
But not all choices are good for everyone. Often enough, someone makes a choice that ruins the lives of everyone around them, devastating dreams and crushing hope into a powder so fine that a simple breath could carry it away and render it forever forgotten.
Choices can have a domino effect, tripping up one person after another, rippling like the drop of a stone in a lake and building into a mighty wave that eventually crashes and takes everything with it.
But the happiness and the pain all have the origin of choice, and without it, neither could exist. Not in any organic form of the word. Choice is the catalyst for human beings. Otherwise, you’re just a mindless bot constructed of artificial intelligence.
And no one wants to be that.
Well, no one outside the warlock cult that my mother and sister were once a member of before they died, but that's a story for another time.
And that time is never.
The end of my theory was met with a silence that was only disrupted by the sounds of chittering sparrows whose biological alarm had yet to register the presence of winter that told them to pack up and head south.
Alan narrowed his potent blue eyes and stared at me like I’d grown another head and that the other head was another me that was just as confusing as the first.
Even mystified, Alan had one of those faces people paid millions for.
Unlike me.
This, I knew for a fact.
During my half of a semester stint in college, I went out on a date with a guy I liked and who I thought liked me. When he asked for a selfie, I thought nothing of sending him one. The photo wasn’t dirty by any means. It was just me stretched out on the bed and fully clothed, yet somehow the photo ended up on a prostitute site.
To say I was pissed would have been the understatement of the year.
I’d been shocked.
Appalled.
Outraged.
And not because my photo was on the site but because of my photo rating.
Three out of five stars.
Three out of five?
Really?
I left it up for another week to see if the rating changed. When it dropped to two point five, I finally reported the photo and buried the memory under a heavy quilt of adolescent lessons and shame.
But now when I thought about it, had that photo been of Alan, the internet would have shut down across the world.
His beauty had probably inspired paintings of angels in old catholic churches. He was old, but his vampiric lineage rendered him forever young.
His features were romantically soft. His skin was almost pale enough to blend with the sheets that covered his lower half. Alan didn’t have the body of a fighter. Only a few inches taller than my five-foot-nothing height, his slim form camouflaged the relentless strength that lurked just underneath the surface.
His hair, which had once been long golden locks that simmered like sunlight, was now cut in a modern, short style thanks to an event that I refused to think about.
I pushed back the flicker of annoyance that tried to take hold of my otherwise mellow disposition and turned my focus back to his eyes. Bewilderment pinched his brows. “Darling, I have no clue what you’re talking about.” The French accent added a tantalizing purr to his words.
I was resting on my front in the middle of the bed. My arms were crossed and pillowing my head, but at his words, I popped up my head. “Seriously? You