I worry a lot.
I worry about a lot of things. It seems like as soon as I patch up one thing, another starts to fall apart. It’s a full time job trying to hold things together. It’d be nice if things were taken off my hands for once. It’d be nice if I didn’t feel like I had so much to worry about. I know some of my problems are all in my head, but some of them aren’t and they’re realer than I’d want them to be.
Sometimes I feel like all I can do is try to keep my problems at bay. I wonder what it’s like to live a charmed (or almost charmed) life with hardly a care in the world.
Memory Weeds
On the end of my block, there used to be a bunch of flowery weeds growing by the curb. I called them my Memory Weeds. They weren’t mine, but I passed by them nearly every day. I felt like nobody else really paid them any attention but me. Anyways, I used to watch them blowing in the wind day after day. And I realized one day that no matter where I was, what I was doing, or how I was feeling, those weeds would blow in the wind. No matter how much might change in my life, those weeds would be unaffected. Somehow it came about that any time something made me especially happy or especially sad, a little voice in my head would say “Memory Weeds.” And after a while, every time that voice in my head chimed those two words, I would think back to the last time those words popped up in my head. I would remember what I was doing or how I was feeling and I’d measure how much time had passed. It was like those weed held my memories for me and allowed me to recollect them at a later time. It taught me that nothing lasts forever; I’ll have bad days but they’ll soon be overtaken by better ones. I came to measure my feelings by how much time passed between remembrances of those weeds. Every time I thought “Memory Weeds,” I was either starting or ending a stretch of happy days or bitter ones. The weeds are gone now, but I still think of them from time to time.
