Just Life

There is a path. You did not pick it. You woke up already walking it. And every hundred metres there is someone, soft and kind, asking if you are still on track. You say yes, on track, you say it like the weather. Parents at the first marker, colleagues at the next. The safe one is the only one you can see from here, so you take it, the steady run, the desk with your name set. There is no other version that you can hold in your hand. Not sustainable, you know that, and no door marked instead. So you stay. You learn the stride. You keep the good clean line. You keep on, head down, the long trudge forward, pilgering ahead. But off to the side, past where the markers stop, the ground goes up, and you can't say how far. And there are mountains you only ever wanted to run for, never once your feet on the open hill. You don't know how far they are, you don't know what they are, you only know reaching them might be the thing that kills you, and that you would feel alive the whole way there. Maybe the mountains are writing only the poems. Maybe an island, your own potatoes, a slower kind of gone. Maybe just not caring, the bright pills, the loud nights, which is its own fast end, and you have done that math along. A penguin breaks the colony and runs toward the white, toward the cold, the certain thing, and you have asked it why. There is being alive, and then there is just living. You stand here at the fork and cannot tell which side is which tonight. You are not brave enough. Say it plain, no shame in it. The slow death of the same game, or the fast one over there. And the worst is not the choosing. The worst is that you would not even know what you were running for. And there are mountains you only ever wanted to run for, never once your feet on the open hill. You don't know how far they are, you don't know what they are, you only know reaching them might be the thing that kills you, and that you would feel alive the whole way there. So you keep walking the line that takes you slowly. (on track, on track) You keep walking the line that takes you slowly. This can't be luck. This can't be chance. This can't be luck. You keep walking. You keep walking.