Dear Pipe Dream,

I opened this document to build my résumé. To compile my experiences and list them alongside dark circles. I wanted to add headings to chapters of my life, as though I could adequately summarize these bundled years in only a handful of words. I wanted to set them in bold. Lace the dates together in italics. I looked forward to formatting myself. Copying my driver’s license. Waiting nervously by the phone. But, if I’m honest, this is one of the most difficult things that I’ve ever done. I’ve never been that good at talking about myself with any sense of pride.

I got lucky only when I wasn’t unlucky. I have a tendency to run head-first into every wall. Some broke easier than others. There are things that I have done that I don’t remember doing. There are years that, anymore, feel like they happened to someone else. Like I’ve replayed some stranger’s bar-story in my mind for so long that, even though I know it’s me in the pictures, I’m convinced that this whole thing is bullshit. There were times when I was supposed to feel proud. Sometimes I did.

Today, a friend compared pipe dreams to loose wheels on bicycles, and it resonated. The way he said it, people like myself were one wrench away from correcting the issue – but we find more fun in careening down some inescapable hill, concrete blending into a rugged blanket beneath us, as the spokes catch desperate twilight in an ever-shifting pattern.

And we do.

I couldn’t argue with him. But in explaining this to me, he highlighted my alienating factor. When he sees that little boy atop that rusty bike, front wheel teetering on a loose nut, he thinks of the wrench. What he misses is the excitement. The rush. Danger. The chaotic sound of it all and the heat rising from the humid pavement and the realization that the trees are only seconds away and there’s no real time to stop, only to breathe.

One last word.

A prayer.

Things are in motion and, for a brief time, we feel so alive. And if you’re reading this and you’re wondering – yes, it hurts like hell at the bottom of that hill. But it doesn’t kill you. Thorns rip skin, leaving jagged lines of faint red that peel across the face over sweat and bruises and a smile. The leaves stick to skinned knees. Our shoes, caked with mud, leave tracks on the side of the highway as we survey the area for a broken kickstand. A bent handlebar. A loose wheel. And a handful of people in your life are destined to drive by in some shiny car, children screaming from the backseat under a blanket of fast-food napkins, just to call you an idiot.

To tell you to give up. To grow up, and find a real job.

The thing is, I swore off a legitimate life a long time ago – choosing instead to treat my body as a camera with a tilted lens. I’m a test-dummy who couldn’t pass math. A trick candle at a child’s birthday party, whose only skill is to stay engulfed in flame. And as silly as it seems, no part of me thought that I would live to see thirteen. Now, thirty creeps on the horizon like a surreal dream.

In two months, I’ll be 28.

My bullet points feel empty. There’s nowhere to talk about my scars.

When they ask if I have a high-school diploma or GED, there’s nowhere to convey the hours of my youth spent enclosed in a bathroom writing bloody messages on my chest as the razor clotted on white marble. Or the first panic attack that sent me spiraling to the sidewalk, my vision collapsing around the orange tip of a cigarette as it rolled against a propane canister outside of the grocery store I once worked at. Or that first smoke-filled meeting – where a homeless man told me how he had killed his wife, but not why. There’s nowhere to tell them just how badly I wanted to die, just to wake up in a hospital to a strange Indian doctor asking questions about my diet and alcohol intake. I learned more about life from locking my father’s corpse in a hearse than I ever learned in college.

No, what they want on the résumé are technical details. A cover letter dripping with excitement for my future. What they want to know is if I’m qualified for whatever mundane task a computer hasn’t been built to replace yet. Do I work well with people? Am I a strong leader? Do I have any hands-on experience in the field?

They want to know, have I learned to use the wrench?

And I haven’t. Not yet. The only thing that seems to keep me alive is knowing that the bottom of the hill can’t kill me, no matter how bad it hurts. And if it did, I wouldn’t know.

Just to keep things interesting, I walk my bike uphill until my calves burn. Arms outstretched on the handlebars. Shirt drenched with sweat. I mumble more curses these days, and my shoes are ruined – they come apart at the soles, so that the breeze freezes my toes. But I get there, right where I want to be. And when I sit down and push off, I may only have a handful of moments. I may only see the passing woods as a blur of greens and browns and regret.

But the whole time I’m careening down that highway, front wheel begging to be set free, I’ll know that the end is right there on the horizon – distant and beautiful and rapidly approaching.

And I’ll be so fucking happy.