Roller Coaster Ride

Life is like an amusement park. You wait outside the gates with such anticipate your heart beats like a lion ready to pounce. But when the gates open it isn’t as you suspected. There are so many people you cannot fathom how you won’t get lost in the sea. You wonder how they’ll ever find you when you’re stacked up against those just like you.

And still you are forced to entire,

yet not without a price,

perhaps your education or freedom will suffice.

Then you are in and so you enter. Within the gates the air is different, full of hope and wonder, it is clean and it is new, at least it is to you. Where to start? Where to go? So many things to do? But when you get to the rides, you realize you don’t make the cut to venture on. So you sit and watch as people who have been there longer than you experience the things you wanted too.

While you wait you go to play games, which you quickly find you’ll never win. Those that do get the prize are set upon a shrine. But not you and the other many few. You, who is brand new to their games, can not understand why they weren’t more forthcoming, why they lied to you about the challenges you’d face. And you dwell upon the pain that you will never be as special as few who were able to win. And those around you think of you as average or far below

and the thoughts that they have about you begin to take their toll. So you play and play and you lose and lose, and lose, while they instill a belief in you that someday you will win.

And that false hope drags you along like a dog to bone daring you to play.

That is until it has taken all your pay. Everything in your pockets is gone.

You are left with nothing but little pride and a body that can never seem to meet the requirements.

And so you travel past ever roller coaster and every game until you find the one that you are allowed ride. You take your seat and strap yourself in because the instructor tells you it’s unsafe if you do not buckle up. But you do not care, god might spare, your brittle body and poor soul. So you ride.

Up, and up you go,

your feet no longer touch the ground and your heart is beating out of its bounds. You go up high and lust with anticipation, only to find that when you come back down you no longer yearn to keep going. And still, you have too, for you are strapped into this journey. But when you looked behind yourself you find others, and suddenly your not so lonely. You're not lost in a crowd but part of a posy. That is until the ride stops and they get off.

You watch as one by one they leave you.

You watch them one by one and you get lonelier than before.

And you watch one by one until you are all that is left of your journey.

And when the ride ends and the daylight dawns. There is nowhere to go but home. So you take your leave and as you pass the gates they ask ‘How was your time?' You tell them, 'It was too short and you wished to do so much more’. You watch as the man takes whatever you’ve collected and smiled behind the closed gates whispering 'Well you only get one ticket.'