We’re leaving the Great Park.<\/p>\n
It’s a scorcher out there.<\/p>\n
Her team just lost six to one.<\/p>\n
She’s quiet on the tortuous zag from the fields.<\/p>\n
I don’t think she feels responsible.<\/p>\n
At 17, she’s philosophical, albeit\u00a0a touch cynical and weary.<\/p>\n
She carries her angst in her pocket.<\/p>\n
“What is nihilism?” She asks the road ahead after a while.<\/p>\n
“Lately, I’ve been thinking about how minuscule<\/p>\n
we are, especially in light of the cosmos and<\/p>\n
the improbable non-existence of other life, somewhere.”<\/p>\n
I haven’t hydrated enough.<\/p>\n
My head hurts slightly.<\/p>\n
“Well, it’s sort of like nothing matters,<\/p>\n
an extreme sort of skepticism,” I immediately regret saying.<\/p>\n
Her eyes widen and the depths of velvet brown<\/p>\n
endlessly recede, raw terror swallowed–stored in a gap.<\/p>\n
“But it’s not just the life’s a bitch then you die philosophy.<\/p>\n
There’s something freeing about understanding our<\/p>\n
insignificance in the larger scheme of things and our utter<\/p>\n
significance at the local level, where we live.<\/p>\n
It doesn’t have to be about uselessness.<\/p>\n
The randomness and chaos of our births and deaths–<\/p>\n
some take comfort in the just-is-ness of it.”<\/p>\n
She still stares out at the road ahead of us, but I hear<\/p>\n
her thinking it over, this great question of being and nothing,<\/p>\n
all tied in knots to her senior year of high school,<\/p>\n
turning 18, the possibility, potential, and unknown…<\/p>\n
she who has always tightroped the anxiety fine line.<\/p>\n
At 65 mph, those last 5 minutes take us no closer to home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We’re leaving the Great Park. It’s a scorcher out there. Her team just lost six to one. She’s quiet on the tortuous zag from the fields. I don’t think she feels responsible. At 17, she’s philosophical, albeit\u00a0a touch cynical and weary. She carries her angst…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marathon-poem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21869"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22082,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21869\/revisions\/22082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}