Humbled

I have fallen from grace and I am humbled. I am never too far from this crash and this burn. I anticipate it. I hold myself rigid, knowing that soon there will be another fall. I dream of the kids I used to know who were cruel. The cool cruel university clique and their barbed humour. I was always too slow to find their chatter amusing. Success was something to be celebrated, but if you fell, then they would step away and turn their heads and I would be alone with it. It is never easy to fail, but this is something I must learn to take gracefully. Something that can only come with age. I feel old. I feel a million years. I'll teach you to surf, he says and for a moment I ride the wave, but there is always the fall. Hard fall, onto water like concrete. Onto the stony faces of a crowd who have watched you come down heavily. I fall. I remember all the falls. And I am humbled.