Nights find me forlorn. Sitting on the edge of a bed I once shared with a man in matrimony. I don’t miss the man; I miss the marriage, although marrying again seems like a cheap ploy now. I was devastated to be a 23 divorcee. Divorce was something I never understood. My parents were married for quite a few years before death snatched my mother. Today, divorce seems a right of passage, much like puberty. It sickens me to be among the rank of the divorced simply because it proves everyone who damned my marriage was right. We were too young.

The death of a marriage is not my only cause of melancholy. I can feel my writing career crumble into ash at my feet. There is no semblance of it left within me. It was charred away by the routine of my daily labor. My payroll and coding and filing have burned what little time, effort and talent I had for my beloved prose. Writing has always been my hopeful escape but I barely put time aside for it now. Those afflictions of greed and sloth have reared their ugly heads and forced me to give up on childish dreams that stand on one leg.

Sitting at the edge of the bed, I feel my life pull at me. My current job barely pays the bills and leaves me tired and stressed at the end of the day. It makes me want to smother myself with pessimism. The job in one year had turned me into a bitter lemon but it hasn’t paid me enough to buy the lemons to make my lips pucker. Money is a liquid, impossible to grasp and yet somehow able to bring down entire buildings or lives, friendships, the usual. Money, the root of all evil and the mother of wars.

Mornings find me slightly more appealing. I arise to the sun and kiss a man on the forehead. To this day, upon looking at him makes my heart swell with every pump. My morning routines are full of optimistic endeavors that all seem to have been forgotten by the end of the day. There is a laundry list of things I will do today to get myself out of debt, to rejuvenate my writing, to find a job with appreciation and a decent pay stub. But at 5pm, I’m a caveman. My feet drag; my knuckles caress the ground I am trodden and have lost the strength to care.

My life continues with days passing where I don’t have a thought as to what I will do to shake myself out of my eight-to-five zombie persona. I’m losing the battle of individuality with myself.

Oh to be a bird, that is about to get hit by a car, what a nice swift death with the ability to die in a bang of feathers.

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