When the Idea of You Means More than You, or Mistakenly Dying Young

EVERYDAY AGED THE SAME, a barren terrain flat and inhospitable, even for the most hopeful of visiting moments. The problem wasn’t days going by, but them going by as one fluid movement absent of the peaks and valleys we come to recognize as life in the form of night and day, joy and sadness, success and failure. All the things and such of living, breathing and dying a bit each day. One monochromatic slow fumble into the next moment paced my movement through a string of indistinguishable days. And all the while, I thought it was me who meant the most.

For days the sofa floated me amidst a sea of indifference, even in the warmth and open possibility of the sun shining. My family hovered like ghosts droning messages surely meant for me, but I was lost in a preoccupation too small for all of us together. With me nearing closer to forty, maybe this is life grown up – words lost in the bigger context of responsibility and flatter sensibilities. Perhaps the adventure should give way to handrails and slower slopes with the rise of age and the lessening of time. Everyone finds their way to who they’ll be, whether it be by discovery or surprise. Once I believed discovery was my path to finding it, but floating then and there I would’ve been just fine with surprise.

Every man must wrestle the idea of meaning and his place in time. My fumbling had all to do with dislodgment from both.

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