Timing is the beastly thing I wage fruitlessly against.

It isn’t my tired bones. The words I speak too quietly. Your arrivals that I don’t adequately celebrate. It isn’t the moments when I can’t show up fully. It’s the ones that follow.

It’s the goodbyes whose towering silhouettes blot out the sun. It’s the singularity that’s left in front of me, lightless and unendingly calling. It’s the echo chamber I step into.

It’s that I can’t immerse myself in one moment, and then the next I don’t get the chance. It is always that way. It is always from the nights when I am too tired that I find myself ushered into mornings when I am alone. Wishing to retreat back to the darkness and the dying of the day and do it again. Will my heavy chest into submission, rattle my slurring thoughts into activity. It is always then that I find myself drenched in the loathing of my own faltering. But it isn’t me, not really. The timing of the world is always looking for opportunities to throw gallows at my feet.

I find that I’ll never be able to make peace with the truth that my humanity will never allow me to be what I want to become. I torture myself with blueprints of this being that I want to build. Complete with moments of unending graciousness, the infallible ability to encompass a moment with totality, this girl will never see the light of day. And I implore myself to find some comfort in that.

I implore myself to stop befriending these tiresome feats of fevered plotting. I have no need to walk through life armed, and yet I weigh myself down with useless weapons with which to defend myself. I toil over strategies that can’t be executed. Because I will never know all of life. I will never anticipate the direction of the ether’s next shift. I must find some fancy in the fleeting or I will go mad.

I must find parity with my humanity. I must stop fighting it like a parasitic symbiote. I must know that it is me. It is only me that I am fighting. And while I have myself by the throat, I fail to notice everyone else loving me. This thing, this impossible creature, that robs me of energy and steals me from these moments. They love it. I wrestle with myself and I steal these moments from me. So I must find some way for us to enjoy them together, my symbiote and I. We will never be apart, we will never be more than one person.

And so I curse timing instead. The trickster that revels in adjoining my lower moments with devoid ones. The one that laughs as I stumble from a grumpy night into a cold morning. The one that leaves an echo of my humanity like a calling card to mock me while I miss you. The one that makes me wish I could do better than my best at the time. The one that shackles my failings to my ankle like a prisoner of its domain. And I am. I will never master it. I will never understand it. I will always only be left to make of it what I can with my feeble human hands. And I will curse it for its unkindness. But I will no longer assume responsibility for its cruelty. I will no longer take ownership of the mark that it makes.

I am human, there is no point denying that any longer. I will get tired and weak, I will feel sad and cantankerous, I will waste nights to my fatigue and mornings to my grief. I will carry this fallibility with me all my life and I will become its friend to make that journey bearable. And I will do the best that I can at any given time and when I find myself alone on a cold morning, I’ll have nothing to curse but my timing.