Between the desk and distant shore, I wade through days with treacle-thick despair, and each morning’s commute a slow submersion into someone else’s dream, while my authentic self that I am looking for pounds against caged walls, while I, a caged bird unable to fly, am singing of fields and trees I’ve never felt and never seen but somehow know as this place, this Shangri-La called home that waits for me.

Yet bills stack like tombstones at my door, and so I sink, neither drowning nor swimming, suspended in this amber urgency, this sickly honeyed quicksand of almost-living, where each pay is both lifeline and chain, and my soul, this thing that I’m looking for, seeps through the cracks like syrup through splayed fingers, too slow to escape, too sweet to let go, too heavy to carry towards the coming sameness of day.