“If you know what you want, and you focus on it – if you refuse to lose sight of what’s most important to you – nothing can stop you from achieving it.”
“You don’t actually believe any of that crap, do you?”
Abbey slammed her laptop shut. “I thought you were going to be locked in your studio all morning.”
“Yeah, I tried that, but I couldn’t come up with anything worthwhile. Then I thought, ‘What if my muse is out here and I locked her out by shutting myself up in the studio?’ Then I thought the muse might be hungry, so I should check the fridge, and while I’m at it, I might as well make myself a sandwich.”
“Have you ever thought that maybe your muse lives in your stomach, and when you’re hungry, she just rattles around in there until you fill up your stomach, at which point she gets back to work?”
“It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘food for thought,’ doesn’t it?”
Abby cracked up, which got her roommate, Kristin, laughing, and pretty soon the two women were so focused on trying to stop laughing, they had completely forgotten about the video of the motivational speaker Abbey had been watching when Kristin walked in on her. Of course, that was Abbey’s plan all along, but silently she kept thinking about what she had heard and how she could apply it to what she wanted.
Abbey already knew what she wanted. She wanted a boyfriend. No, not just a boyfriend (the motivational speaker had been very insistent on the need to be specific). She wanted a soulmate. She wanted someone she could love forever and ever. Someone who would love her forever and ever. Someone who would always have her back, no matter what.
Having been raised on a steady diet of fairy tales and Disney movies, Abbey had always thought that one day love would find her. She’d be minding her own business, cleaning her stepmother’s castle, or frolicking through the woods, or singing to herself while brushing out her really long hair in a very tall tower, and some handsome prince would come along, fall madly in love with her, and whisk her off to her very own fairy-tale wedding.
She had long given up on the idea of her true love being a prince, or that he would fall in love with her because he happened to hear her sing, but she was starting to realize she had held on to the idea that women were supposed to be passive in matters of the heart. She was sitting back and waiting for a man to come along and woo her. And she called herself a feminist!
Abbey had friends who had not been looking for a soulmate when they fell in love and got married, but she also had friends who had spent a lot of time on various dating apps very intentionally looking for a spouse. Abbey wasn’t sure she was ready to delve into the world of online dating, but she was ready to take a more proactive approach to her love life.
To be continued…