Home alone on Easter Sunday, there is plenty of time to think; to consider, for example, what life might look like if I’d just had a little more willpower. To reflect on what could have and still could be in the space between now and too late. These are not thoughts drawn darkly, but instead the constant tick and hum of my heartbeat cycling towards what if. I am no great fan of regret. It does not fire me the way motivators should–little does these days. Still, I have no desire to look back in a week, a month, a decade and wonder how life should have been better. I prefer to believe that there is still a part of me that holds ember and can choose to spark flame–even if that part of me is tethered to the parts of me soaked in fat and doubt and disuse.
I was thinking about my mid-kid the other day and how much he reminds me of a younger version of myself. It terrifies me. He is absolutely the kid who sees a bit of thread hanging loose and tears at it until the world itself unravels. He is the kid who knows too much for his own good and deep down inside even knows when he is outclassed. He is the kid who can never accept being outclassed less that fire –that pile of ember burning red inside of him–is smothered by reality. I am terrified because I know I cannot protect him from the reality he faces everyday.
I am terrified that I don’t have the drive to show him that life won’t smother those embers and that if it does, it is life that will burn and not you whose flame blinks out forever. Perhaps I am terrified that what I want to believe isn’t true.