One day, you wake up
numb except for this dull pain
at the center of your chest,
and this feeling like
you want to go backward,
and you want to move on,
and you don’t know
how it is, exactly, you can
do either. You wake up,
not exactly that you’d
been asleep before,
except maybe that you’d
been kidding yourself,
imagining a lot of things
that really had no chance at all
of working out. Somehow,
you can trace it all back,
find out exactly what it was
that was the turning point,
mark it down as when
IT ALL WENT WRONG
— though it wasn’t exactly that,
but a bunch of little things,
none significant in itself,
but enough of them
collect, and the center of
gravity shifts, imperceptibly,
and then you do that
one little extra thing wrong,
and everything falls over.
And it was all a dream,
before, something
that never really happened,
because it comes to
one day, you wake up
numb except for this dull pain
at the center of your chest,
and you find for the life of you,
that you can’t move at all.
