Valley

Are the highs worth it, when the lows do drag on so? you feel yourself ask, as you guide the old station wagon through the mountain pass. The leaves change color and I cannot feel a thing. Later, under a stream of increasingly hot water, you try to remember that this state comes and goes, that the depths of your lows are no more valid than the dazzle of your highs. This is not proof of your utter insignificance. 

But one can only spend so many hours staring into the abyss before it begins to feel familiar, can only wade around in the muck of one's own misdirection before the path seems out of reach forever. Eleven years I have been chewing this same cud, and what have we learned but that time wait for no one and you should've planted that tree eleven years ago, you daft cow. Nearly four decades you have known the only path you wanted to walk and yet all of that time you have spent rolling instead in ditches. It's no wonder you wonder if the ditch wasn't where you belonged, after all. 

You're not paranoid
if they're really out to get you.