The Future is a Monkey that Lives on My Back

It is hard describing the pain from bearing broken dreams, but the shards that cut deepest must belong to those shattered by doing nothing. By the day their jagged edges sink deeper when recall of things you could have done, would have done, should have done, roil your guts with bilious regret and diarrheic fear. The result is having your mental frame doubled over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, widowed of hope or happiness, haunted by the ghosts of failures Past - worse, strangled by the callow death-grip of their gnarly fingers at your throat while they feast on every ounce of goodwill or courage you possess. Like piggybacking an intractably possessive 600-pound gorilla, as it were, its gluttonous fangs sunk deep in your neck and shoulderblades slowly bleeding you of life, while you writhe desperately to shake it off...

It is why, when I twist my gaze backward to stare into the unforgiving vacancy of its eyes, I see not only the Past but also the unremitting mask of the Future. As a child, that image used to be a clean slate. A blank canvas that I could paint with whatever color I chose from the easel of Experience. A watercolor wonderland of hues drawn from the shared histories of family, friends, and strangers, my easel of Experience only grew richer and more diverse as I grew, its colors even more vibrant as my stroking actions with the paintbrush of the Present laid down the tracing contours of Success for my Future to follow. With Failure, the hues got darker...In the beginning, their shadowy marks bore the imperative of contrast before which my light strokes of Success could illuminate the even more iridescent flashes of the Future, homeland of Hope, Mother of Dreams. But as they multiplied the strokes grew harder, crystallizing to a cold, barren visage of broken Dreams obscuring more and more the fiery visions of Hope that lay beyond the canvas, and now all that is left are tiny pinpoints of Hopeful radiance beaming out this daunting mask of the Future painted in the dour pigment of Failure...

So I stopped painting. My brush lowered, my movements stilled, I stay stagnated and transfix my gaze on the remnant light shafts of Hope I have left beaming from the Future. Knowing only the right, light strokes of Success will expose more of their warmth to me, but petrified by Fear that the wrong strokes will rob me of what little rays of hope I have left. And yet I find the good intentions of deferring my actions foundered by a fatal flaw: my pregnant pause, my Procrastination, allows this masked temporal monstrosity on my back to feed on my Hopes insatiably and leave me basking in the false afterglow of dead stars. The Hope that hypnotizes me to inaction is but an illusion. A macabre trick to render me immobile while this monkey gorges on all Hopes and Dreams until there are but brittle bones littering the floor, themselves soon ground to smithereens beneath the hulking mass of a Failure-streaked Past and Future immutably combined...

Slowly a sobering realization of this appalling destiny dawns on me. Breaking out my false Hope-addled reverie, my grip on the Present tightens. It's a herculean effort to lift the brush easel-ward, but I manage it. Poised at the point of dip, I ponder what hues of experience to choose, at which points of the Future's canvas to begin, how lightly to stroke, at which angle my wrist should swivel, what strokes of Failure to leave untouched and learn from, and on the laundry list of decisions doth run...

Ach. I guess I'll do it tomorrow.