How do you clean up a lifetime of rubble,
the broken bits and pieces strewn shotgun across the land.
Do you sweep it under the rug and try again?
Stand barefoot on shredded ground, bleeding?
Or do you sift through the pile, piece by piece,
and decide - what to keep and what to discard?
I think it’s the latter.
It’s a bumpy thing this road we’re on.
At times I speed down it, oblivious to its rocky and jarring nature.
Or so I think until a wheel falls off the truck, a bolt works its way loose, a hose comes unplugged, and I am stranded from the destruction of it all.
Other times I ease my way, cresting every ridge, rolling across every washboard gently.
Just creeping along.
And in those times my patience wears thin.
And in those times I roll down the windows.
I let the wind come in. I let it push the hair across my face,
breaking any semblance or effort to look
poised.
Well groomed.
Together.
It’s freeing in its way.
Like a phrase stuck in my head from so long ago, no longer applicable.
I can’t remember it anyway.
And somewhere amid it all there is a moment of acceptance.
That this is my life and it may never be anything but.
I suspected it would eventually come to this
as much as I now know it is.
Because when you go down this road there is no turning back.
There is no stopping at the gate and watching,
just to feel safe for a moment.
There is only boot on the pedal and forward to be driven.
The life I knew before has been peeled away
like the slow circular rind of an apple displaced by the steadiness of a pocketknife
held firm by a warm and weathered hand.
Sometimes I cry from it all.
Sometimes I laugh.
But mostly now I just breathe.
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