"Breaking Out"

I become lucid, remembering the heat of blood and heartbeats. The coming months are brimming, lulled like spring even as the leaves will fall. I am invested in finding my path, back on the road after a blind detour through thick woods.

I feel alive and scared. The pieces I juggle, should they crash, can no longer be replaced--the moment is about to pass, and to fail is to let down everyone who has ever given me a second thought.

The end of August so often percolates, offering hints most of which turn to dust . . . I remember news of Jane, and meeting Jennifer, and Professor Lackey, and my first serious writing class: four, three, two, and one year ago. How much burns away, and the clock-hands move round without pause.

The rope I walk has been narrowing, and the depths below look always darker. There is a sunrise-gradient ahead that opens slowly, and my footsteps confirm the scarcity of balance. I attempt to move ahead of the twentieth century. The air thins, yet grows heavy . . . my face is red, my gaze wavers only from sweat dripping thickly as evidence of the distance I have covered.

I don't know what is to come. I know of a hundred possible endings, and a million paths to any of them, and I focus on the ten that retain fragments of uncorrupted dream. What I have to do:
I have to live,
I have to prepare for my future,
I have to believe in myself,
I have to sway with necessity,
I have to put one foot in front of the other,
and if I am to fall, I have to grab the rope, holding on beyond my hands become crimson, summoning frenzy to pull myself back up--

for the depths would turn me into just another casualty,
but I must be more than human.