A Short Clean Ladder

I took the green ladder to the car wash. Or maybe I didn’t take it there but it was there beside my car, getting washed instead of my car, nothing to do with a car at the carwash.

Ladders are a path to nowhere. They end abruptly and then you can only go down. Maybe change a lightbulb or paint a ceiling, maybe climb onto the roof or some other high up place. But then what? And what if you shift your weight wrong? Broken ankle, busted nose, fractured wrist, cracked head.

I watched the ladder get washed. I felt the spray of thin wisps of chemical water through my T-shirt and wondered why the ladder was at the carwash, why I was at the carwash, inside the carwash.

Cleaning my path forward, only as far as I could see. Without my glasses. Which is not far. Clearing the road ahead just a little bit. Because I just had a birthday and the year ahead has arrived.

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Now Is Better Than Then

After twenty five years, I became a teenager again. It didn’t happen like freaky friday or through some supernatural lightening storm. There was no trading places with a random kid on the street through a car wreck . It was much simpler: I woke up and I was fifteen.

I’ll admit that I have fantasized about this. I’m nostalgic for the nineties and the memories that feel too faint. But I never thought it would happen. Or could happen. When it did, all the teenage anxiety resurfaced, as if the years of therapy to undo the shit that is teen dome, were erased. Only I knew it. I knew what I know now.

I tried to get a job at a coffee shop, but they said I was too young. I wanted a martini. Too young. Sex. Too young. My own house. Too young.

I am an adult, I tried to explain.

Yeah yeah, all the adults said.

I reached into my bag of deep personal work and therapy language, buddhist meditation and Pema Chodron quotes, for a place of acceptance. This is who I am now even though it sucks, I said to myself. I can do without martinis, jobs, a house and even sex. But what I couldn’t do without, what was missing the first time around and now again, was the feeling of love. Loving and being loved. That love I had with my partner after and before I was a teenager again.

Like the first time, it felt like I would be a teenager forever. But like that time, like all times, it eventually ended.