I have come to know myself as a tired person; a person with ambition, yes, but only to a point. You see ambition weighs heavy on a person’s mind, cold and dead like a rock, unattainable standards. I am exhausted. My rock is very heavy. I worry its ruining all I want to be and that’s just the thing, it is all I want to be. Do you see the circle I’m running in? Chasing my tail like a dog, panting and dizzy, landing in the same place I began, frustrated and tired, so so tired. Who am I to have this rock? It is a privilege, a blessing, a curse. It’s a curse, a heavy curse. I hate it and I love it. It makes me and destroys me in the same moment, in the same step forward and back again. I am always in the place I started. I am followed by my shadow, always a step behind (or ahead depending how you look at it), just out of reach but still taunting, “come on, touch me.” I step, run, leap in the unwavering light of the sun but my absence follows as if it were me, it is me. Dancing like an invalid for the laughing world, “come on, touch me.” I can’t, I won’t, I don’t. I reach out and fall again and again and again. Sweat beads on my skin pulsing hot with blood, my aching muscles pull me up, contracting involuntarily out of habit; matter over mind. I scream out but no sound forms. It’s been trapped in my throat and refuses to move, a smothering ball of pleasure and pain locked tight between my voice box and tongue. I swallow, I cough, it is immovable. “come on, touch me.” my own voice now echoing back at me in an empty room, mocking. I reach out, my warm skin against the cold cement “gotcha” Laughter now, I am touching the rock resting on my chest; a deadly parasite bitter to the touch, numbing to the mind. I rock my body, back and forth, back and forth, in and out of light and shadow. Closing my eyes, allowing the tears to form and fall with my rhythmic movement, turning to ice the moment they hit the ground, tinkling like broken glass. Once more, back, forth. The weight shifts slightly, I hold my breath, it topples and breaks. I rise up, I wipe my face, and I run against the sun and my shadow and my own expectations about what I should be, what I ought to be. I step, leap, run, laughing, I am not tired anymore. I breathe therefore I am. I laugh therefore I am. I am therefore I am. “Come on, touch me… I dare you.”