Working Class Hero

We weren't together long. The earth was here longer, and the earth will out live us all in the end. We are finite and infinitesimally small, so small, that sometimes I wonder why I worry about things, when we're all so insignificantly inopportune. 

I used to speak about the sky. Those long days and years of my younger life seemed like the weight from the length of a rope upon my shoulders. I told everyone I could about how the sky looked some nights, and how it seemed to save me in that moment. It was a very special sky, soft, foggy, padding through the evening like a tentative puppy too naive to understand its own innocence. It was mauve, bordering on the side of orange and pink. The wind was gentle with me and I gave my eyes up as an offering to the beauty of firmament. That seems so long ago, except the sky still looks like that sometimes, sometimes when I need it most. 

We aren't exactly cognizant of how we seem to muddle through the tragedy of a mundane and restless existence. We just keep going until we get a singular break, and then we realize that we cannot possibly go back to it all, but we do in the end, this is all we know. 

A woman I once trusted told me we all cannot become what we want to become. The world needs the lucky and the lost and the losers, how else will we diversify and realize our unique subservience? We can't all be stars, she heckled, we can't all be CEOs or actors or astronauts. The world needs pig farmers and janitors. This is just so.

Revolutions were held all over the world one afternoon, and I couldn't go. I cried along with the sufferers, while I myself stayed subservient to a tyrannical rule that stated I could not chose a side, I could only chronicle both.

I'm tired now, my body is shutting down, my heart keeps skipping beats, turning over amongst my ribs, playing jump rope with my arteries. I cannot sleep though. I have dreams about the past, I have good dreams, I have soft, incandescent, goose down feathered dreams. I simply cannot go through them anymore. I dreamed of a house with mint walls and wicker furniture and heart shaped pots and pans. I dreamed I was Lucille, polka dot dresses and furs on the hangers colored light purple like the bags that hang under my eyes when I wake up after the dreams. I'll get up and perform the daily ritual, sacrificing myself to this grind, ground coffee starting to burn, burnt out, out the door, doors to be opened, doors to be held, doors to be closed before I catch the handle, maybe I can't handle this, this world so utterly indifferent, what is it like to be different, vociferous, clamorous, clammy hands holding my pen, filling out my schedule, filled for days, days of plain, ordinary living. 

I'm a nervous wreck, but what else do I expect to do? Isn't this all I envisioned? The billboard outside my window has been tried and convicted, the paper message ripped to shreds, the only thing left is the black block letters that read "WINNER!". I don't understand what this is supposed to mean to me, but eventually it'll mean something.