Apply Liberally

What does it mean to be an adult of a certain age and to so entirely not have your shit together? And how did we get here from there? And does it matter to anyone, least of all to oneself?


Many of my peers have gone down the path of least resistance. Soul-sucking job in some partitioned room beneath florescent lights. Been there, done that, couldn't do it anymore. So I traded it in for something a little more highbrow. Only to fully realize years later my soul is still being sucked dry by a windowless unpartitioned office beneath the dim and unforgiving buzz of florescent lights. I protect her in the off hours, to be sure. But I think someone else is always getting to Scotland afore me.


Time doesn't fly in the workaday world I inhabit. It crawls like a lazy tick. And I am conscious almost every second of every day of the life force being leached out of me. I feel it in my marrow bones. I know it is a rotten situation for me. I know it's time to hit the road, Jack. But the road less traveled is still the one I set my sights on. And this is where time starts playing tricks. Because this is the part where I start to feel conscious of it running out. That the road is too tough to hoe.


I push colored pins into the map of my existence, tracking my journey throughout this mortal coil. I know where I've been. I know why I am here now. But what I cannot do is plan my trip to get to the next destination, anywhere.


I imagine my peers aren't aware of their lost souls. Or they are better at compensating for the damage done by the peeling of the ozone layer that once protected it, by the rip in the fabric of their time. They own homes and have the latest in babies, cars, vacations, kitchenware. They have a plan for what happens when they pack a box of office detritus and slap on their gold watch and head out into the golden light. I have never been one of them and it's obvious I am unlikely to ever be. I am glad I don't live on that street.


I am less glad that I am not one of their higher-minded kin, the do-gooders on the avenue, the ones that managed to cocoon their souls by studying and learning and working in careers that offer a sky-high SPF and a circle to travel in that nurtures rather than destroys, and eventually they too have their families, and their lives, and their sense of satisfaction in themselves.


I live somewhere on a boulevard all to myself. Mostly I took the road less traveled by and the difference has been--that I am crippled by fear and anxiety about this business of being--for it is a business. The sun shines on the art of the soul, not the commerce. But here the bank account is low, a girl's gotta grift as good as she gets, she better know how to poor. And sometimes the UV rays punch through to remind me that I want the other things too. But it's too hot to go look for them now.


It's tiresome to feel one is doing more wrong than right. It's tiresome to know one's wiring is faulty in the grid of the way it's supposed to be. And it's tiresome that at this age, responsibilities and dreams come crashing through at the speed of light, scorching up everything in their path on the way in for a landing, and leaving behind burns that scar even as they heal.


And that's how I feel about this fixed point in time.