Sometimes when I’m walking
from work alongside kids who
live close to the school, I imagine
living on a car-free island, where
everybody carries a backpack,
and there’s no electricity or
computers, and where neighbors
at the end of a long day, come
over to your house to quietly
sit on your porch with you and
watch the birds flicker across the
twilight sky, like tiny flames
buzzing out of a small, but robust
fire.

A man drives by me on the way
to work, and flips off another driver,
before peeling rubber around him,
mainly because the one in the front
didn’t accelerate fast enough. A
mother walks her kid to school
in heels longer than my penis, then
starts to jog down the curb, pulling
the arm of her daughter practically
out of its socket. She’s got to get to
where she’s going last month, even
if it costs her her kid. I’m not living
like that. Doing so, to me, feels like
how I imagine shooting yourself in
the head would feel if it were in slow
motion.

I’d like to make it to Medicare, if
I can. But I know that I may not,
the way the life spans of males, at
least in my life, seem to be declining
pretty rapidly. The statistics say that
80 is the average life span of a male
in the US, but for my male friends,
colleagues and family that number
is closer to 60 than 80. Why hope
for retirement if I’m just going to die
the second I reach it. The last ten
years I feel like I’ve aged 100
trying to keep others young.

Which is why I’ve been trying to
live a kind of soft retirement since
my mid 30’s. That way at least I
can tell myself that when I finally
never have one, I had a work/life
balance that never needed to be
eventual.

I’d rather meander to work sipping
on coffee, in between staring up into
the trees for woodpeckers and blowing
morning snot into the bushes, than
always feel like some future that’ll
never be here is outpacing me, and
that if I don’t hurt everybody around
me to keep up with it, I simply won’t be.
I think I need to feel the ground under
my feet more than most. The sensation
of my butt in a chair I confess is one
of my favorite sensations. “I’ll be
there as soon as I’m finished here,”
has become one my off the cushion,
self-compassion responses I use
each rare instance I’m so promptly
asked to do something three months
ago.