other worlds

You learn the life that is in your hands is not the one you've been saving, and the ragged roll of wrongs just seems to keep unfurling. This sympathy at first misplaced turns out to be mistaken, and the same old saw drones on and on in the movie in your mind. Your blood unspilled, just a little spatter. Your thoughts too real against this weight of matter. Here you are, bent back and sore bones and this story you created.

This misery only half mistakes, the rest bent towards the oblivion of spent wishes and missed flights. The road less traveled, the road untaken, all the pieces you mistook for puzzles crowded in this battered box. That life you supposed now inviolate despite the life you spent away, the things you should have seen, the things you should have said. The strange way the mirror makes our face never fit the photographs. The odd call other worlds hold on the clumsy meat inside your skull. These fictions and fantasies that only prove you unfit to hold your place in the world. The sadness of these imaginings destroys you in the end.

Your questions eventually name your mistakes, the world they see and you say drifting further and further apart.  The victories, the failures, the love, the loss. Soon it moves you from loser to lost. The closet full of coats you can't remember, the words that fill your pockets and your hat. Your life like some ancient constellation, hard to see from the shine of other brighter lives, indistinguishable from any other set of names and stars. Your life unrecognizable as described or by description.  The bitter drift of possibility, the despair of losing worlds that never were. Something someone said, returning to you as sleep wanders off unattended. Something that you never heard, giving away the ending.