it’s bad when it isn’t your fault. you don’t become a dancer because your body grows in the wrong size (ballerinas don’t have hips, dear), so even though your heart loves it, you shuffle by without it, only doing salsa in the store, taking easy-peasy classes and closing your eyes.
or you love the idea of math, of simplicity, of a language all can speak. but you sit down and they swim in front of your nose, taunting you. you spend hours hunched over a book reading the same two sentences over and over. walk yourself through kumon videos and wikihow and wolfram alpha. but it comes back with a “D” and you gotta just. know you tried and it didn’t work out, did it. this isn’t something you can manage.
there are worse dreams to lose, of course, than the what-ifs. but then you’re lying there half-drunk and saying “yeah, i loved ice skating but my knees gave out” “i wanted to run a bakery but with what startup money” “after he died it didn’t make sense to go to school anymore”. like you know that you never even had a door, that you only had a window to peek in and see a better land. like, you had a glimpse, and even while looking, you knew - this one wasn’t for you.
there’s worse things to lose, you tell yourself. there’s worse things to lose.
