What Comes Next?

I'm racing to finish a script that I want to submit for a December 31 deadline. Well, I say I'm racing; it's not a marathon, though, more like I'm doing a series of sprints to try to get it done. I haven't been able to sit down and work on it for more than one consecutive hour for the past several days.

The script is very different in tone and structure than my usual style. Without revealing anything about the (slightly bizarre) plot, I can say that one of the central questions of the play is "What comes next?"

One of the characters desperately asks another: "What comes next? What am I supposed to do next? I don't know, and I need you to tell me - please - what comes next?"

I feel as if right now that bit of dialogue applies to my process of writing this script... and to my life in general.

I realized today, while driving from one Sunday appointment to the next, that I'm well into my second year of really not knowing what comes next. Clearly, we never really know - but at least for me, all the way up until I went to college, "college" was what would come next. Then I put in four years of college, not knowing exactly what would come next - but before graduating, I signed on for a finite two-year job. So I knew two years of work would come next. And then I was pretty set on the idea that after that, graduate school was what would come next. That too came to pass, and that too was finite and structured - another two years of knowing, at least basically, what was in store for me. Those two years ended in April 2007.

Now, what comes next?

I took one job after graduate school and then unexpectedly moved into another. I didn't expect to change jobs. I moved into a "temporary" apartment with a month to month lease, and expected to move out of that within a few months - but nearly two years later, I'm still in this apartment. I have no quantifiable life timeline at this point. No schedule. No "next."

I have goals and dreams and deadlines, of course. I have busy days, weeks, events on the calendar scheduled for months from now. But no big moves on the immediate horizon, no academic calendar to follow, no next step charted out. Liberating? Terrifying? Depends on the moment.

It's eleven thirty on a Sunday night. I have a conference to attend tomorrow. What comes next? Bedtime. That's all I can say definitively right now.