If I had an orchard.

"Do you ever feel like you're failing yourself?" I ask Wayland. It's nearing midnight and he's mostly asleep, so he pulls himself out of a half-snore and mutters, "Sometimes."

"I think that lately -- that I'm failing myself," I tell him as I walk back into the bathroom to take my contacts out. "I'm not being what I should be." You are what you should be, my brain pulls out of a half-snore to mutter at me. I tamp it down. "But that's okay," I say. "It's a challenge. I can take it."

Like I tell Violet to say out loud every time she falls on a hike and starts wailing, no matter how severe the injury (it's never severe): "I am ROCKING this trail." I urge her to say it, and remind her: "You fell because you are going for it. You are ROCKING it. And you got that fall out of the way, so now there won't be any more falls."

I'm lying to her because of course there will be more falls. There are always more falls, literal and metaphorical. She falls again not five minutes later and there is a small scrape on her knee. A little blood. She does the open mouthed, full body sob. "Violet," I remind her. "You are ROCKING this trail." And she sucks in a breath. "Yes!" She exclaims, turning the tears off almost immediately. "I got that fall out of the way! I'm getting my falls out of the way!"

It's a good lesson, I decide, and not a lie, exactly. You go, you fall, you get up. That fall is out of the way so you can get ready to repeat the process. Is that what life is? Falling down, getting up. Getting up, falling down? Is life more getting up or falling down? I think it's the middle of that, the comma between the phrases, the pause between highs and lows. Keeping balanced when gravity and inertia are working against you.

My problem is not that I am failing myself, it's that I'm in a pause, seeking the high -- when the pauses are what to seek. Where to stay.

It's maybe why this song "Helplessness Blues" by Fleet Foxes basically kills me dead. It's a song about living in the pauses. "If I had an orchard/I'd work 'til I'm raw/If I had an orchard/I'd work 'til I'm sore."