He wasn’t real. He wasn’t himself. And he was terrified that if they ever found out…”
“They would hate him,” Taylor finished.
“Never real. Never good enough. You’re not loved for who you are, you’re only conditionally loved for who you are not. It’s such a trap. And I know, I lived in that trap for a long, long time.” Lily smiled. “At least until he showed up on my doorstep.”
Taylor grinned. “For a date which, if I remember correctly, you wanted to cancel.”
“We both did!” Lily said with an even bigger laugh. “The opera?” She shook her head. “I still thank God that I let it slip that I would rather be dead than go to the opera. Crazy thing is, I still to this minute don’t know what possessed me to say that.”
“You were too authentic to get the mask to stick,” Taylor said, wishing she could be like that. “Maybe that is death. Wearing the mask. Not being who you really are. Maybe that’s the death we’re trying to do the imaginal thing to get out of.”
Lily nodded slowly. “We were just talking the other night about contrast, how life keeps letting us choose the wrong thing, hoping that eventually we’ll figure out not to keep choosing that.”
“Never thought about it like that.”
“It’s like me with Peter. Life was going to let me go down that path as long as I needed to until I figured out it was the wrong path for me. Contrast shows us up-close-and-personal what we don’t want so that we can eventually learn what we do. I saw with Peter someone who looked great on the outside but who was controlling and manipulative on the inside. I saw it, but I kept going with it because I didn’t trust my own judgment. I thought I was being too hard on him, after all, he was a successful man that everyone respected. Or so I believed… or at least wanted to believe. If I would’ve taken five minutes to get really real with myself, I knew what he was. I knew he was no good for me and that I should get out. But all those other voices in my head drown out my own voice. Now that I’ve cleared my head of the other voices, I can finally hear my own.”
“That must be nice.”
“It is. Believe me. I can say, ‘Yes’ when I mean ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ when I mean ‘No.’ I’m not constantly shape-shifting trying to figure out where everyone else wants me to be, or who they want me to be.”
Taylor remembered Jaylan during the scavenger hunt, and while it would’ve been nice to be able to feel superior, all she felt was sadness. Jaylan was doing what so many others including Taylor herself had done—just trying to fit in and wrecking her own life in the process.
“It’s funny,” Lily said, “because the more I learn about the choice we’re making, the more it all makes sense.”
“What does?”
Lily sat forward. “Like in church. You hear that God gives us free will and that He sets before us life and death and we’re supposed to choose. But what does that even mean? It can’t mean like being alive or being dead, it’s more symbolic than that because we’re all alive on some level. What I’m coming to see is that life or death is about choosing between the two roads that Frost talked about. Life, being fully alive, is like this grand dance with God where we’re constantly learning to be more and more what He made us to be—whether that makes sense to other people or not. Death is just doing things to make other people happy even though it’s killing us inside. It’s all saying the same thing just with different words.
“Mitchell and I talk all the time about our families and all the social pressure our generation has that kind of says, ‘It doesn’t matter how it feels as long as you look good doing it.’ We can’t eveneat and enjoy a meal without taking a picture of it first. We’re so busy creating our highlight reel that we forget to just live.”
“It’s like the girl that told her family she was going on vacation then spent two weeks in her apartment setting up fake selfies to see if anyone would notice she hadn’t actually left,” Taylor said.
“Wow. That’s tragic.”
“It’s all so shallow.”
“And pointless.”
Taylor nodded. “And pointless. But it’s hard to know how to go deep too. It’s hard when