Once we were young & willing and waiting to inhale. Everything we had inside us laughed at life with a nervous energy that still believed life could be tamed & conquered, even defeated. Youth hung on our faces like pimples waiting to pop. The future was a redwood and I worshiped it from my bedroom window.

In those days people told us we could become anything, and we believed them. I used to say I’d be making six figures by the time I was twenty-five; friends would gaze in jealous admiration at my kick-ass report cards and believe me; adults would nod approvingly as if mastering geometry was a worthwhile achievement and earning six figures a worthy goal.

Then slowly the backyard leaves evacuated the trees inside me. Men came with hardhats & sharp, loud tools; they tore down my hopes that any compatibility might exist between the things I wanted and the things I wanted to do. Doubt & disparity rose like a charismatic dictators who bring hope to ailing countries in which living is less important than believing. And finally dreams toppled like deadwood giving way to chainsaws—trees could never rival swimming pools inside the duplex families new to excessive white living.

Could it really be that ten years have gone by? Whose unsatisfied eyes are those that scowl at me from the crying mirror?

It’s been some time now since the daydreams have stopped keeping me afloat. Today lines forge across my skin like involuntary rivers rerouting to accommodate new colonies. People no longer promise me I can be “anything”; now they say “get a real job” and they roll their eyes at my lazy alibis. And even as I do the things I’m supposed to want to need to do, I can’t shake this feeling that something else–or maybe everything else–is more important.

It is.