I feel as tangled thread and string. Whose lines have become taught and twisted from years of neglect, with risk the break should force be thrown asunder. All these ties are muddled together precariously, seemingly impossible, and inevitable at the same time. I look at my life, which all used to sit so uniformly driven to a single point now fraying from the pressure. I feel as if I am coming to point of needing to make sense of which of these filaments needs to stay or go. Which ones I need to safeguard and others which may just be thrown away. For now I sit, pulling on these strings, attempting to undo these snares and coils. What have I let myself become?

I’m so confused about this life. The infinite possibilities of a life well lived have created disparate paths to follow, and yet I feel both pulled everywhere and nowhere all at once. The hope is to find one string and grab hold, but which one to grasp? One that takes me further away from this place, full of mystery, wonder, and work, or one that is full of familiarity, ease, predictability, and experience. So far, my choices have come up with slack, as the cords I’ve drawn lead me to the echos of a thread that may have been but were cut short through the collision with someone else’s destiny. That is no fault of the thread, but it does leave me standing alone, needing to return to this pile of unanswered questions and looping destinies.

Perhaps I should be like Alexander the Great, cutting the Gordian cord and getting rid of this awful business, but what would I be left with? Unhappy people and shortened strings. It’s the kneading and proving that consumes my time. This determination to understand the difficulty before I lift a hand to fix it. But with each passing day, the knot remains, and my potential path moves further from me. I feel I am being left behind by this destiny I had invested so heavily. I’m afraid that I will find myself nowhere and that all this leads up to nothing. The mounting anxieties plague me as my accounts dwindle away like sands of an hourglass, knowing full well that eventually, my time will be up, and I will be left standing empty.

I sit and think of these paths, hoping to divine a better future for myself. But in believing in some way that each step will lead me down a road of no return, I remain unmoved. Unsensible as that is, when left with so many choices, I freeze, wondering whether the path I have taken to this point was the right one. So many questions, being left with my thoughts and space is probably how the cords got tangled up in the first place.

I sit here, examining the knot, wondering whether it will loosen and let me free. I stand stalled, but time is running, and all that’s left is to pull.