What if, after waking up to the realization that you’ve got everything you ever wanted, having beaten what you always wanted to beat, you further grow up and realize that,

fulfillment, while sort of getting rid of suffering, can’t get rid of your pain or take what traumas still stick to the insides of your body away?

I asked myself this tonight, on my walk home from work as I waited at a crosswalk for it to signal that I could limp in a straight line, admiring the random seagulls flying over my favorite Crab Rangoon making establishment Man Yee, and how they would be perfect in a moody monochromatic watercolor painting in steel greys, but also perfect in a grotesque, providing you painted them inside out from having barely survived the gnashing blur of a growling plane propeller.

Which to be honest, is how I feel these days, my arms and legs trying to stay attached, my face withdrawing into itself like a sea anemone, my spirit pulling itself down the roads and across the fields, while my body still manages to look like me standing here, asking what’s up with a smile on its face and a twinkle in its eye,

like a real pleasant and lucky guy who made it and then some.