one.
You're just another punk kid with ambitions way, way above his five-foot-five head (and yeah, another short joke's exactly what you need, thanks, even from yourself) but you have a good feeling about this one. No, you have a great feeling about this one. It's a feeling so great you don't even feel it, you know it, deep in your bones, (and fuck cliches, seriously, man, fuck them, except that something made them cliches in the first place, and stunning originality just means you've thought up something no one else has thought to think of before).

But feeling doesn't get you where you want to go, even with how hard you feel, how hard you know. So you work your ass off for it - going to all the right places, gladhanding all the right people, doing as much as you can to ensure that you don't end up like the middle-aged washouts that congregate in the bar after five on Thursday nights, muttering incoherently into their beers about how "yeah, I used to have dreams. I used to have dreams."



two.
See, it's not the failing you're afraid of - not the fall and the bleeding nor the lingering scorn. You've taken more shit than life really has a right to give you, and you're not gonna say you haven't fallen before, that you won't this time, because that would be a baldfaced lie, a sin if you were to ask your momma, because you've fallen. You've fallen light, just gotten a little dirt on the heels of your hands and maybe ground a few threads loose from the knees of your already threadbare jeans, and you've fallen hard, too. Done both of them more than once, but the hard seems to come more than a little more often than the light; maybe it's that they tend to come close together, so the first fall has you staggering downwards, twisting your ankle or turning both your elbows into a gritty raw mess, but then you get up, spit in the face of whatever did the pushing. But the thing is, it's bigger than you, and it pushes you down again, and this time you hear something crack, and it's a little harder to pull yourself up, to paste on that fuck-you sneer you know it's just waiting for, but you do it anyway, do it again and again and again, until it leaves you lying on the ground, more opened blood vessels and exposed muscle on the surface than skin, and really all you want to do is stay there a while. But as soon as the footsteps fade you're back up again, maybe leaning against the alley wall, but you're up.

So you're intimately aware of what the falling is like and how much it can suck, but practice makes perfect, you figure, and you're not afraid of the fall. What you're afraid of is coming up to the edge of the cliff and peering over its sheer edge, mist where you think the bottom should be so it looks like the end of the world or at least something out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and instead of putting both feet half over the void and listening to the small landslide of gravel and tiny chunks of cliffside tumble down and down and down as you wait for the fall, you shake your head and take two steps carefully backwards.

Two steps isn't a lot, and that's what scares you. Because all it takes is two steps, and then suddenly you have your own place in the bar on Thursday nights when you get out of your mediocre office job or whatever the hell you've setttled for, and you've got your own beer now to mutter into, your own mantra to repeat, week after week - "yeah, I used to be cool."



three.
So you take your steps against the mediocre office job, the after-five Thursday beers. You spend long hours (sometimes weeks) picking tattoos - picking sites, picking designs. You never have to think about picking colors, because that one's easy. They're all going to be heavy black, stark against your skin, so there's not a dress shirt thick enough to conceal their shadows, so there's not an office job in the world that will take you.

The thing is, though, with all the cash you'd gotten for graduation invested for all to see on your skin, there's not a whole lot of other jobs that'll take you either, certainly none that involve face time. But you grin and bear it, work odd jobs for wealthier or luckier friends who take pity on you, the occasional stranger who doesn't give a shit what you look like as long as you do what they fucking ask you to do while you look like it. It's okay that nobody really wants you to do all that much for them, at least not on a steady, regular basis. That just leaves you freer for when it happens. You're saving yourself so that you can save the world, and the irony or maybe the sheer cheese of that line strikes you all at once, and you laugh.



four.
And then one day it happens. It's sudden, and not the kind of sudden that you thought the office job would be, the kind of sudden that's really not. The kind that's prefaced by a long slow slide of incremental changes that you don't notice and can't remember until you look up one Thursday night at seven o'clock, into your third or fourth beer, and you hear yourself muttering about your dreams and your glory days. But this isn't that kind of sudden at all, it's the kind of sudden that's an actual surprise, and when it happens you think you might keel over in shock, because for all your planning and dreaming and gladhanding and connecting, for the sheer amount of effort you put in to this, in the back of your head you never really expected it to happen, still expected to be some five-foot-five punk kid with the dreams he couldn't reach even with a stepladder. One day you look up and there's this guy, all sincere face and sickly angles, and he asks you if you want to save the world.

You look up, because you realize that you've been looking down at the mist where the bottom of the canyon should be for so long that you've been thinking of it as normal, but you haven't really moved in years. Today, though, you take a step deliberately forward, line the delicate arches of your feet up with the edge and look up at the sky, arms outstretched. You feel your mouth stretch in a smile, feel your tongue shape all the air in your lungs into an emphatic "yes", no hesitation, and the guy smiles.

You don't know whether you'll fall or not, you think, don't know how long you can pull off this balancing act without a bridge magically forming from the stone under your feet, but you'll sure as hell try as long as you need to. And now you know you're not waiting for that slow slide into mediocrity, know that whatever happens to you, it'll be sudden and sharp - lingering - like the knowledge that there's no Santa Claus, like the burn of cheap vodka down your throat.