focus

She wasn’t planning on lounging on the couch all day. No. She fully intended to go to the supermarket, clean the kitchen, and possibly even take a shower. Greasy strands of hair fell onto her face with the daunting possibility of causing yet another pimple on her cheek. She didn’t care. She brushed it aside, but could almost hear her mother saying “Lianna wash your face”, so she opted to pull all of her greasy hair into a messy bun on top of her head. She knew she looked disgusting. Pathetic even. At some point she realized she wasn’t paying attention to the movie that was flashing around on the television screen. The film was in Vietnamese…or was it Thai? She wasn’t sure, but she had stopped reading the subtitles about half an hour ago. A car cautiously pulled into the drive-way. Feeling like a pathetic excuse for a daughter, she hopped off of the couch, nearly spilling her Diet Coke on the way, snatched her baby out of the bassinet and ran upstairs to the makeshift nursery.

She gently placed her little girl into the mahogany crib and turned on some music to prevent any unnecessary crying. She pulled off all her clothes and sprinted to the shower, stepping on a hairbrush and a bottle of lotion on the way. The sparkly scented lotion squeezed out all over the carpet. She would have to clean that up later. In the shower, she washed her hair and face, thought about shaving her legs but shrugged, decided against it, and jumped back out. She had only a few minutes to appear as though she had actually led a productive day. The agreement with her mother was very straightforward. Lianna and her daughter (whom she named “Nina” after her “baby-daddy’s mother”), were able to stay with Lianna ’s mother (Carolina -- who, by the way, had no grandchildren named after her) as long as Lianna was studying to become a certified physical therapist. Each evening, Lianna ’s mother watched Nina as Lianna went to a coffee shop to study for the certification exam. It was their routine and until recently it was working quite nicely. Lately, however, Lianna was getting discouraged and sidetracked. Lately everything was just…different. More painful. More exhausting.

She spent four hours writing emails and surfing through Facebook in order to live vicariously through the social lives of other people. She had once had a social life. In fact, she was quite the bombshell (and in reality, still was when she actually got all done up). Life had changed. She had changed. By the time the coffee shop was closing, she hadn’t studied at all and was forced to return to the house that was not hers; the life that was not hers. It was her mother’s. And before that, it was her boyfriend’s. There had been a time, not too long ago, when she owned her life. She could selfishly make decisions based on how she felt at that moment. That time had come and gone. Nina was her number one now and they would figure out how to own their lives together.