There are only a handful of reasons you’re still here, and on a good day you can remember half of them.
It’s been this way for a while, but you just keep trying, you know? You just keep trying to sort through the good and the bad and find something in the midst of it that’s worth calling a life. Nothing in that jumble looks like the lives other people have. Nothing that makes you happy is quite the same as theirs, and your good things are all stained with just a little bitterness from being poor and tired and screwed over too many times to count. Most of the pictures where you look happy are forced smiles; most of the joy you’ve felt on holidays and family vacations was manufactured to make them a little better for the other people with you.
Sometimes you dream of running away and being someone else and seeing if things are better there, but you’re too chicken to give up the little happiness you’ve found on that kind of gamble. You were born a dreamer who thinks big, and you’d give anything to be just another schmuck who doesn’t question the hand he was dealt. It’s a tough spot. College doesn’t want you. Friends scatter and regroup at distant points. Family clings, god, clings like a creeper vine that can’t realize it’s killing the tree it winds around, sucking out the life.
No one wants you to leave even though you’re the great white hope, because somehow even when you’re wasting all that potential by staying, they want you there to remind them that they did something right. Never realizing they’re turning you into a carbon copy of them; giving you their burdens by expecting you to be the thing that cheers them up and distracts them from each one. You’d give anything to not be the youngest, so you could make like your siblings and unapologetically pass the buck to someone else. Instead you’re stuck with it, your back bowed under the hopes and dreams and aspirations, the worries and regrets and hurts, the stories and histories and ghosts of people you never met.
Stuck in some town, some house, some life that’s a collage of other people’s desires and doesn’t fit you at all. A hand-me-down-sweater life, that’s what it is. And some threads are already coming loose.
