Sometimes I feel that I am in a psychic jail, paying off the debts of my life’s imperfections. I am cast upon a small rock island, a fruitless raft tossed by ocean’s waves, always pushing, always threatening to throw me onto the shore’s cliffs.
I hope for mercy and penance in return for the deep debts I seem to be in.
In debt to life, the burden of each day occasionally seems too much; I am unable to clarify, to state clearly to my self where I am, how I got here, and whom I owe.
My parents, my teachers, family, friends, colleagues, neighbors…who else?
Who else? My own imaginations of how they imagined I could be, would be, should be, sometimes at odds with how I am. How I am, in my own terms to myself? – sometimes whispering, at other times, screeching.
Do I not live a life equal to that which they hoped I could; do I not let them be the persons that they willed and will; did their own debts and pain-filled penances spill over onto me, onto my future, its hopes and would-be’s and would have been’s?
Would I know what to do, where to go, if ever I could satisfy the debts of soul and spirit and life’s accumulations?
Penance! Penance?