#resmea

What do you do when you realize that maybe you aren’t cut out for your dream? It’s the only thing you ever thought you were going to do with your life, and only now you’re coming to realize that you don’t really like it? Work is work is work, but this work isn’t particularly gratifying, nor is it really that important, and that makes it difficult to get done. But you’ve already spent your whole life preparing for it. You feel so incredibly lost. It’s like having a roadmap for a country, that you find out, has never existed. And you feel like, “What am I doing here? How did I even get to this point?”  The feeling crushes you. “I’m not supposed to be here,” is another one. 

Where am I supposed to be? Why does it seem like everyone else knows exactly where they’re supposed to be, but not me? Why do I feel that no matter what I’m doing, I’m wasting my time? Why do I have to want something ‘better’ than a simple job at a simple store, where I work my hours and then go home and enjoy my free time with the people I love? Why did everyone tell me I have to change the world when I was growing up?

I’m tired. I want to sit down beside the love of my life and read a book, or write a poem. I want to make tea for her and when we’re done our little break, I want to go back outside and finish my work. I want to keep what’s most important close to me and keep what’s close to me the most important. I’m tired of worrying about bombings on the other side of the world, horrible as they are. I don’t want to write abstract papers about a subject I don’t care about. I want to throw a plastic straw into the trash without feeling guilty, just one time. Let the mega-corporations save the earth; they’re the ones who broke it. I want to just worry about myself for a while. 

Did I eat well today? Did I drink enough water? Am I sleeping enough? What time am I going to the gym today? When’s the last time I caught up with an old friend? Am I working on the things I have the power to change? Am I keeping my dispositions in check? Am I looking with wonder, or with disdain? Can my family and friends see the love in my heart?

“A human moving through time

Is just like a fish in a river:

At home.”

The woman turns her head and asks:

“Does it sting for the fish too?”

A friend loses an arm in an industrial accident

Three hundred kilometres away,

It’s my fault

If only I tugged on the thread of fate a little harder.

Maybe they’d change their minds

Come back! I can’t come back, he says

You know, an airplane’s “thrust reverser”

Doesn’t really reverse the thrust

Not really

It only points it somewhere else

But it’s so loud. And when it ends,

It’s not true but

For a second yours is the only plane in the world

I’ll tug harder next time, I’ll tug when

The next stop is mine

Why is the world scheduled to end so soon?

I have places to be. We all do.

And the cabin is submerged

In white noise. Ah, but it won’t work, see

No such thing as a thrust reverser, not really

He can’t wear shoes with laces anymore

She never got an answer to her question

But we all know more than we ever did!

And everything else floats

I think I am in love with you

I say something else instead, like

I'm so glad we got to spend the weekend together

But this is not a betrayal of the truth

nor is it a kind of punitive restraint, which

I so often subject myself to.

I might not be dragging the chain

I might the gardener among my friends the toads

a flourishing all my own

The want - that violent depth charge -

plunges within me and upon finding nothing else

collides with my ribcage, then

detonates—

Then rupture, then exodus.

On a snowy café bench beside the Bow River

a man writes a letter to his son

he sends his love, but firstly

his concern: you do not have so much time

here, and I have even less

And the snow falls, and flakes pile on top

of flakes, on top of flakes, on top of flakes.

An admission: I hoped it would be different

this time

but the plebeian truth:

change is brought piecemeal, one parcel

transported on the back

of the evening air

Another tied to the robe

of the repentant sinner,

mewling.

The man’s letter never reaches his son.

In the rage of the winter it is slivered

by the ice

and they both disappear

into the white, and the bench too,