we take this song to the grave

Thoreau said that the mass of men lead quiet lives of desperation. Living in New York in your 20's, it's easy to see what he meant. It's a place for dreamers, and a place for said company to see those dreams die a slow and astonishing death before their eyes. Dreams pass away while we wait in hope for some last minute reprieve. A curtain call. A sign. We hope for miracles despite our better judgment. Something to show us the way.

Maybe part of growing up is slowly realizing the illusions you had about where your life would go, about the capacity you had to control your own destiny, were just illusions, while we ignored the warning signs along the way. I am the exception, I am the stand-alone, I am the outlier, we would chant and sway and sing. What experience shows us is that the starlit fantasies of our early twenties, the endless possibilities that we believed to have lain before us, seem more frivolous than any right-minded being would have the courage to admit to themselves. There's a slow and solemn negotiation that we undertake each year that passes, each day that we see the opportunities that shone so bright burn out in the glare of what the day to day truly holds for us.

We dream of independence, creativity, self sufficiency; of something more than we are. We dream of book deals and featured blogs and underground glory. But all we seem to find is less and less to hold on to hope for. Rather than piling up avenues to success with the experiences we gain, we only discover the boundaries and detours. At our weakest moments, we cower to the forces of things too far out of our reach and attempt to consider the alternatives.

But as many times as we tell ourselves that we need to settle, or that we need to accept the way that things really are, the more desperately we cling to the arbitrary hope of our ascension: the Big Break, the moment of truth, or even haphazard luck. The mysterious stuff of youth and desire.

The plain truth is that we can't lose that hope. We'd die without it. But it drags us through the mire and scours us on the worn and well-trodden path of so many before us.

Is it enough to live with our quiet meditations on possibility while we push the rock up the hill again? Is it enough to keep daydreaming while we're wide awake? I often wonder if the things I loved were ultimately successful, stable ventures, would I still feel this lack? Would this sentence I've given myself simply evaporate and leave no record of its stay? If only I didn't know what I know, or find myself wanting what I do...

It's an isolating and solipsistic path that I can't help but follow at every turn, and it only leads me to see my own selfishness and doubt, with nothing to blame but my foolish yearning for something more that what I am and what I'm able to be in the world right now.

I know it's not supposed to be simple. If we didn't struggle and strive for something, what would get us through this day or the next? We would have no song to carry us through to the grave; no pulsing, pounding melody to hum to ourselves all along the way. So many times I feel like I'll never have the chance to sing that song. I'll wonder what would have happened if I only had the chance. And that is the most heartbreaking part of it all, because all I really have to do is sing it, even if no one is there to listen. There are just these moments when I'm all too aware of the silence that could follow.