Asymptotic

I am simply at my worst these days.
Wild and unpredictable emotions rush on me - it's a place where the layers of control and composure are very thin.

This school year has been an endless working, always desperate, collection of days.

Each passing week seemed to unmask some flaw in me - like peeling a rotten onion.

Emotionally, spiritually, I droop like a hanged man.

It’s not the work. I survive practice and academic battles as if by some brand of magic.

No, it’s more.
I have lost my goal. Like biblical engineers raising the tower of Babel on the plain of Sennaar, I am struck by a lack of focus - my direction, my original plan, seems shallow, I stand purposefully gelded.

It’s worse because I’m somehow SO much less whom I want to BE.

Like an asymptotic curve I constantly miss my ideal. I am hunted, internally, by my own inner voice, that ruthless, pitiless, seeker of perfection - it lurks like the prowling wolf, in a bent-walk stalk - sifting my every thought, my every action for flaws - until like the wing weary hunted prey I could almost welcome the killer's warmth for sweet silence.

In a mood somewhere between cowardly and courageous I finally approached my Mom.

In a speech from the scaffold I told her of my black, tight, treacherous spiral - of my doubts about EVERYTHING.

I expected the worst - a disappointment, in less than cryptic, ciphered messages, a slow sharpening of her claws on me for ENDLESS shortcomings.

Instead I got miracles.

As if rigid constellations had shifted - an atmosphere of freedom earned - and at least for that moment, the mom who used to sing me awake in the mornings as a girl - and a delicious summer of rest.

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