I don’t have the answers. I don’t know what will make me happier, make you freer. I don’t know what collection of things will make this easier. I don’t know what I want.

Perhaps we choose the path of most resistance when we center our worlds around something we can’t harness. Maybe there’s never a mixture that keels evenly over time. Maybe it’s always volatile because we play with chemicals we don’t understand. Maybe it’s one day and then the next. Maybe it’s this until it is that. And maybe I have more say in the way I react in the proximity of these unidentifiable chemicals than I know.

I’m sure I can change my vantage. From toes to fingers, I can root, I can rise. I can remember that my problems are luxurious ones. Livable agonies. I can tell myself, over and over again, that this is temporary. But then I remember that I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know what I want. And I just want it to be over.

I fear the wedge that drives between me. I lament the wine soaked place I go to hide. I chide the high hopes that ride on the backs of expectations only I have. And I wish to just enjoy, so fully, this crawl space in time that is fertilizing my life with rich soil in which to plant myself.

But I will always be this. A collection of chemicals I don’t understand. A collision of reactions that I’m not always able to anticipate. A careening thing spinning around an unharnessable force. A fallible creature who finds the answers after the question has long been posed. A blundering thing scrounging for grace in quiet moments. Something so capable of loving, so willingly vigilant, doing the best she can.

I don’t have the answers to questions I can’t even form, in languages I don’t even know how to translate. I don’t know what the right thing is. And there’s something freeing in the act of shedding that responsibility. I don’t know what I want. I just don’t want this. This feeling. The pridelessness. The convenience fee with too high a cost. And maybe my endless toiling only serves to whip up the chemical reactions I try to hypothesize away. Perhaps I should just live; reject what doesn’t honor me, lead with what agrees with me, and let life find a way around the cracks I fill. It no longer serves me, it seems, to get upset about the foolish prizes I win of foolish games. And I need not accept them.