Success

Success Is Inevitable

Heather Rose experienced two epiphanies while growing up. The first one happened at a ballet show she attended when she was nine. She had the one seat in the theater with a view of what was occurring on stage left behind the curtain.

It turned out that Heather was way more interested in watching the finely tuned, well timed chaos behind the scenes rather than the actual production itself. One specific moment stuck with her, and became one of the most crucial pieces of evidence for her life’s thesis. Around a minute before she was due on stage, a ballerina fell and cut her palm open; within seconds the stage crew had the wound bandaged , she came on stage with such poise and grace that it was as if nothing had happened,

Heather had never witnessed anything like it before. The ballerina had looked out of her window, saw there was a hurricane going on outside, and gave a casual shrug as she decided to go for a stroll anyway. At least, that was what Heather saw; the massive amount of work it took to make difficult things look easy, and that was when she realized how powerful the illusion of effortlessness was.

The second epiphany came to her while sitting on a maroon cushion across from a fortune teller when she was twelve. The fortune teller’s spindle like, costume jewelry covered fingers plucked a tarot card from the splayed out deck in between her and Heather. She gave a sly smile, and explained that the answer to whatever question Heather had asked in her head was “Success is inevitable!”.

Heather had always been surrounded by people who did not see the potential that was all around like she did . This made her second guess her rose gold tinted, cumulus cloud like vision of getting everything she ever wanted in life. Where others saw thousands of inconvenient hoops to jump through that had the distinct chance of turning out to be nothing; she saw exciting possibilities that could lead her to where she wanted to go.

Those three words were what kept her moving centimeter by centimeter towards an outline of something grand far off in the horizon. They instilled a deep sense of belief in her that she could make the figments of her imagination come to fruition no matter if she was the only one who knew it was possible . “Success is inevitable” was the edge of the table that she held on to for stability when the entire room was spinning out of control from the topsy turviness of doubt.

As soon as she turned eighteen, she was off to New York. Heather’s dream was not to be something specific like an actress or a singer. It was more abstract than a particular role or career.

She wanted the audience to think about the feelings her performances gave them years after they left the show. In her imagination, the elderly told their uninterested grandchildren about how amazing of a performance she put on over a bowl of rice pudding forty years after her fourth and final retirement. Heather Rose was going to be unforgettable.

Now, she was not the most talented or even the hardest worker on Broadway, and she was never going to be. But, she did show up to work no matter if she had a broken heart or the flu, or if she felt her skills were underdeveloped years after things should have come naturally. She was there at auditions and rehearsals every single day with a poker face that would have fooled the most seasoned dealers on the Vegas strip .

She recalled resisting the temptation to roll her eyes when her friends complained about their lives. They would shed tears when they dropped their hats, and one minor inconvenience would send them into a two hour rant about how their lives were so difficult. Meanwhile, Heather once had a man she thought she was going to spend the rest of her life with end their engagement on an opening night of a musical about a love story, and she went on stage to give the best performance of her career to date, so she was not the most supportive audience when it came to the perceived faint of heart.

No matter how many times she was on stage, she felt like every performance was lacking a piece of something that she could not describe. They were photographs that were a bit out of focus ; a joke that was supposed to get a few more laughs than it did . Heather always pictured how certain parts of the scene would go in her head, and they were always more abrupt , and clunky than they were in her mind.

However, no audience, crew or cast member would ever know that from the look on her face. Her life rarely felt glamorous, but her white diamond necklace would suggest otherwise. Heather Rose had the ability to hurl herself blindly, frantically forward through fields of frost bitten thorns while making it look like a Sunday afternoon stroll in the park in late spring.

It took time, but she eventually got everything she wanted. The wishlist in her mind that she pretended did not exist was completely fulfilled. It was all cumulus clouds, and leaving thousands of permanent imprints on audiences’ minds.

Heather often thought about the ballerina, the fortune teller, and the millions of other women that made nearly impossible things look easy every day. Their steady heartbeats, and “I can do this” sighs to themselves every morning were the sounds that composed the rhythms she set each step forward to. Maybe, that is what the tarot card meant.

Success is inevitable, because you will make it so.