keyword: patience, title: a tiny basket of years in misc. flash fiction

You aren’t your hopes and dreams, you know. They’re parts of you, important parts, but not all that you are. You aren’t a list of aspirations, goals and immutable desires, to either be achieved in triumph or rued in failure. You’re a little bit those things as well but that’s not nearly the story of your life. You’re so much more plastic and precious than all that. So much more changeable. Dynamic. Alive, if you’re looking for a single word to land on. Alive.

But you live in a culture of “no settling”, don’t you? No compromise. My way or the highway, all that terrible gibberish. Standing your ground. Don’t give an inch or they’ll take a mile. The fetish that is toughness. You decide to be a fireman at five and if anything else happens over the next seventy years, you were just weak-willed dirt, weren’t you? Aren’t you?

Of course you aren’t but that’s how you’re still told to feel, here at the end of an empire, because it makes you easier to exploit. It makes you work harder not better, it makes you blame yourself when things go wrong, instead of others, instead of the disorganized systems you live in. You’re just supposed to have patience, supposed to see everything through to the end. You’re supposed to be strong. Hold on tight to the dreams you had ten thousand plot twists ago, your whole body cycled through cells six times over since but so long as you never re-evaluate, you can pretend that you’re the exact same thing you’ve always been. Even though you’re not.

No, you are legion. You are alive. There are those who would never allow themselves anything quite as common and trite as happiness or love. They will say you are supposed to strive and achieve and grasp and fight every minute and if you’re not, you’re just a sucker and a quitter.

Don’t be one of those people.

You are complexities. You are meat and blood and experience and instinct and wonder and heartbreak and memory and imagination and bonds and bones and fears and a tiny basket of years you get to be any of those things, all of those things, for just the tiniest while. You are paradoxes that should cancel out and yet there they are both, to remind you that there are no opposites, no absolutes, no perfect or perfectly imperfect states anywhere under the sun.

You can change, it’s okay. You can rest, it’s okay. You can breathe, it’s okay. Sometimes those dreams will shatter and fall, swift as Jericho’s walls, that’s okay too. Because they are not you. They’re part of you, but they’re not nearly all.

These aren’t ruins, you know. They’re the building blocks of something new, if you let them be. Pick them up, put them together in new ways that’ll work better now. That process, of making something new again from what once seemed lost, that process is called being alive. So live.

Last updated October 16, 2019