From Your Lips She Drew the Hallelujah

It's all a trade-off.

I believe in trade-offs like Christians believe in Heaven.

When you hit that point where your hands are stuck in your hair and your breaths are fast and painful.  And you think to yourself, that at the end of the road, there will be something waiting for you and those you love.  That the struggle HAS to be worth something.  That your hard work, your perseverance, your sweat, your heartache, will all culminate in a beautiful overflowing of peace.

That is somebody else's heaven, and it makes it worth something to keep going.

Me, personally, I think when you die, you die.  Your systems shut down.  Your pieces fall apart.  You stop and goo begins, and that goo goes on to do different, if not better, things with itself.  I don't have a heaven.  I don't want a heaven.  And to quote the lovely Beth, it don't fool me, either.

Nope.

My trade-off is here.  It's now.  It's summed up at the end of each calendar year.

I play a progress game.  I push that bar forward until I level and then I push it forward again.  Each time it gets harder to push, but I keep pushing.

And when my hands are stuck in my hair and my breaths are fast and painful, I feel it, I feel it in every fiber, and I have no numbness, no relief.  My trade-off, my trade-off for letting the panic cover me, is that maybe somewhere out of this chaos I will have created something.

Maybe when the ADD mess of half-finished projects, goals, and ambitions all settle into the ground and dissolve into something else, I will have affected somebody, something else.  There will have been a cause in the world to what I did.  I panicked and I screamed and I stumbled and I cut myself, but when I was finished, a dog was taken off of a highway full of traffic and put in a dog bed with a yard and a patient, loving owner.  When I lift my head up, I eased somebody else's breathing.  When I open my eyes, I can look over my shoulder, and see that you are the person you are because I was there for you, even when it hurt me to do it.

I am scared.

I am alone.

I don't have anyone to blame for that except the person I have made myself.  But it's a trade-off.  Because if I keep working, and I keep going, and I keep pushing right through the hurdles and giving more and more of myself, then at the end of the day, when my last breath slips out from my lips, I'll know

That you know

I loved you

And I would do it all again.