Weak Confessions

My foot slips while I am trying to loop the rope around the bicycle wheel frame I've managed to suspend in the limbs of my tree. I feel a rush of air across my body, a blur of green maple leaves, and suddenly the ground has flung open its arms to embrace me. I lay there, at the ankles of my dearest pal, unable to breathe for some seconds, shocked, muscles already tightening like boa constrictors in my neck and back, and I cry a little.

In the next few, achingly long minutes, I manage to crawl to my front door, only to be scooped up by my mom and rushed to the emergency room. I spent the next week or so in a neck brace, and the next month stiffly walking around, but by the end of July, I had climbed my tree again and I'll be damned if I didn't finally finished the pulley system I was working on.

Right now, I'm in a lot of pain, caused not by an accident of youth, but an unknown spectre, it's ethereal teeth gnawing at my skull in all my waking moments for the last eight months. I'm weak now, my endurance is flagging, and I'm finally starting to feel the effects on my fortitude. I'm ill prepared to deal with this sort of injury. I imagine that I could relive that fall over and over again, and survive it, but I don't know where the edge of this is and I don't know how much longer I can keep at this and still pursue the things I desire.

Ultimately, I'm scared that this headache will end up being something like that fall could have been, something to end me. I'm on the edge between pressing onward with endurance and determination and just stopping while I'm here, because I'm uncertain that I have it in me to keep this up forever, or much longer for that matter.

One thing I think for certain, when and if the time comes to stop pursuing school, or education, or my dreams which require much of me, it will come like the fall did, unexpected, shocking, and hard. It will happen all at once and I don't know that I'll be too terribly ashamed of it.