so Go If You're Able

The rest does wonders, the chicken soup like a cliche with purpose. You wake in the late afternoon with a spring waiting in your steps, although the park finds you wishing for more breath in your lungs. Late afternoon revelers space out along the benches; I stand in a friend's front yard looking in through their windows: we make ourselves heard via phone. The internet is full of ingenuinty and creative entertainment. What on earth did they do go get through the Spanish flu? she says, but the truth is your experience is based on what you expect. You cannot miss a meme if they do not exist.

Still, you cannot help but admonish your inactivity. Should you not be creating all the wonders that have been waiting for your time? Should you not, now, have absolute access to the Universe and make something of it? Are you not, at last, out of excuses?

You begin to think that the churning of your chest is not so much a death rattle, as a capitulation to your own shortcomings. That may be worse.