from my latest novel...
It’s about the quality you spend on life, not the quantity. Esthar hadn’t felt that fact so keenly since she was a barefoot teenager hitchhiking to music festivals with her hippie friends. Everybody looks at you askance, the creatures on the fringe. Whimsical well-wishers and suspicious law-abiders alike waver between fascination and fear. To challenge and defy social norms is to risk the by turns tantalizing and terrifying label of freak. And now, after all her high-end dabbling and pretentious pontificating, Esthar realized that the disapproving, curious sideways glances were merely the look on the other side of the same people’s faces. And if the smoke and mirrors of social acceptance were all that were keeping her from feeling the sand between her toes and wearing what she wanted, they could crash and burn around her for all she cared. It was about forging her own path instead of following the maze that societal norms had laid out for her. Maybe she didn’t want to help put up those walls after all. Maybe she wanted to keep walking in a straight line.
Oh shit, thought Esthar. After all my maturing and growing and career-building I’ve come back full circle as a dip-shit conspiracy-theory screw-the-man hippie.
Except that now I’m older than the first time so it’s a little more absurd.
But she caught herself.
Ah, fuck it. I’m nothing but myself. And I’m being true to that. This is me.