Plight

Years fold over, in pieces and torn sheets, crumpling under the weight of everything that came before. And this is how the world breathes history. Getting old feels like a fever, succumbing to heaviness and decay. Intrepidity seems centuries away, lost in a foreign land, in a distant mythology. To stray is striken down as cowardice, as if the path was always clear, breaking power cables from the shine of the undiluted neon. But maps are only given to those who already know where they’re going, not to hitchhikers who are trying to find home, not just the way to get there. And so, we ask everyone who they are and what they want and where they came from, hoping to bleed the same DNA, hoping to match someone, anyone. I think it’s easy to sneer and scoff at this unfettered assail, but don’t you hear the desperation in our voices? Because even if our larynxes don’t sound so pretty, don’t echo quite pleasant, at lease they have a sound. But what use is a voice if no one pays attention? Whoever came up with the idea of a tree falling in a forest with no one around must have been surrounded by people that never listened. It may be sadder to think that way, but I’m sad enough to think that way. On the highway alone, each step plays the teeter-totter of getting and not quite getting there. Your left foot revives your resolves while your right shrinks your aspirations right back down. You are supposed to be getting wiser as you get older, but the pages have been glued together, wrenched and nailed shut, ripped into silence. So when the tiny sapling falls, the redwood forest doesn’t bend down low enough to notice. The roots disperse away, because quite frankly, no one was paying attention at all.