I wouldn't change the work, or the struggle, the Sisyphean tasks that drive through an endless connection of days, past furnace fear and unbridled joy, and to something deeper and infinitely more "normal;" the way we sit in an empty barn, trying to dry wet hay in the sun and then weave it into something resembling Structure and then sob quietly in the dark.

I wouldn't change the rejections, simple words with impossible size and weight, repeated phrases dripping over tongues with contempt, regret or a dissociated drawl, the simple and the stark, from the bus passing you by to a dream in a puddle, murky and unidentifiable, the joke about God laughing as you make plans or other "failures like you" that eventually stopped failing just long enough to be lucky

I wouldn't change the hardest lessons that you can learn while still keeping it together ("the test of a first rate mind..."), the Beckett-esque "I can't go on; I'll go on" of the quotidian mixed with the the most soul-crushing and body breaking of realizations, that you can't control someone else, that you can hardly save yourself, that this is likely all there is, that you can't insulate yourself from the things you fear the most and that you are, more likely than not, your own worst enemy, that death by a million paper cuts happens quicker than you think and that you think too much about everything that means nothing and not nearly enough about the things that mean something

I wouldn't change the mistakes that were made or are made everyday, the slipped mental gears and grinding transmission that wears metal down to the bone and creates a heat wrapped in a series of vague suggestions, skirting the issues, dodging the full weight of the truth, bearing whatever a broken spirit can bear without facing down the facts, sometimes these mistakes are the highlights that make everything else worth it, and sometimes they are the moments that show how worthless so much of those seemingly important things really are

I wouldn't change the expectations, where you sit in the frame of someone else's shot and how tall you are when you stare yourself down through the looking glass, wouldn't change the pressure from within to make it nor the pressure around that keeps your shoulders from ever really feeling relaxed or your back from ever being completely unsore, the mental white noise that pervades in the silence of an otherwise still moment


I would only change how strong I can be in the face of something so looming and brutal and how easily I am pushed to tears by a fleeting moment, a wind that cuts through your jacket for just for a few seconds and reminds you how cold it really is outside, a cloud that covers the sun and tells you that it's not really spring yet, a sound that you can't hear anymore in your old age and the smile on the face of a child that you cannot, for all the wonder in the world, remember how to get back.