I wish I didn’t have to know that inside every adult there is a spirit-sized wound that spews like a child’s volcano project creeping into the hallway,

like the first zit on my nose that I popped in the mirror and made squirt across the bathroom, because I thought if I could make what was inside it fly further than I was tall, I would be cool.

This came to me this morning when, in my usual fashion, I sat down at my desk and started to brood about the dark night of the soul I’ve been traveling through since I was supposedly too young to have one, and was reminded of the street I grew up on and how I spent what seemed my whole childhood looking at it from the end of my driveway like it was a river I’d need to decide which way to float down.

The truth is I still haven’t made up my mind about what to do next,

and in fact, I’m still there, picking my nose and playing with myself in a place and time before leaving, wondering which way I should go, right or left, left or right, when I know both ways eventually intersect at the beginning of another street, intersect at the beginning of another parallel,

another decision I’ll spend the next two decades squeezing myself onto.

I have a self-awarded doctorate in being indecisive and whimsical, which is to say now I’m an expert in letting the wind blow what’s left of my hair into the next hairstyle,

because cool, as far as my baby head can tell, has always arrived from someplace as cold, dark and uncomfortable as a squabbling couple behind a door arguing over a fart that wasn’t taken outside of time and soul to a place beyond the house.