What to do when life doesn’t play fair

QUESTIONS
What To Do When
Life Doesn't Play Fair

By Neli Lalanne

Someone up there is looking down and laughing at me; and I would take a stab at breaking the Da Vinci Code on an empty stomach 7 times before attempting to figure out his motive. It’s all a joke isn’t it? Like a good actor trying to salvage a bad movie with no plot, and an off beat soundtrack, I feel overworked. He’s doted me with all these assets, all this potential yet just for kicks stuck me in a dark labyrinth with doors that lead nowhere; kicked back, put his feet up, grabbed the remote, turned on the tely and grinned as he watched my life play on. With each fall he smiles, and using the voices of those who surround me he whispers: “It’ll be alright”.

Well buddy you should have blessed me with blind patience instead of intelligence, that way I would be able to pray with more conviction and grieve with less passion.

Why give me the ability to rationalize and have me grow up in a third world country?

Why breathe in my pores the desire to soar but glue me down to a room with low ceilings?

Why enable me to feel yet freeze the hearts of those I reach out to?

News flash it’s not alright. You must have missed a comma or a period or something because the numbers don’t add up. Unless you are factoring in mistakes from lifetimes prior, the sum of my torments doesn’t equate the level of wrongs I’ve committed! If you were less sadistic you would have minimized the contradictions and kept it simple. That fateful day I left the comfort and security of my mother’s womb to enter this vicious world, I should have been an oblivious infant, grown up to become a detached teenager and then later: an existentialist, capable of not only understanding but relating to Camus and Sartre.

I would have then embraced the concept of being a misunderstood individual strolling around in a hostile and often indifferent universe. I would have accepted human existence as being unexplainable and not bother to ask questions like ‘why’ when I get a parking ticket, or a flat tire under the rain or a loan rejection or an I’m sorry-try-again letter from some job I applied to. What I mean is I wouldn’t flinch when life didn’t play fair. For example, I would be too stupid or too dense to feel my heart collapse when he said he didn’t want me and I would be incapable of sensing pain comparable to 13 paper cuts on one eye lid when realizing that I loved the wrong man for 21months.
And I bet you that he is up there right now, watching me as we speak. The exit door is to the left, I am running to the right, and the irony of the situation is simply hilarious to him. It makes me wonder what’s the point of trying?

If I am going to end up with an asshole anyway, if I am condemned to a life of mediocrity filled with un-materialized dreams to ruminate, what’s the point of striving?
If I am doomed to choke on the hopelessness that those with too many assets and not enough outlets experience, what’s the point of striving?
If I am a promising tree denied oxygen as plant, what’s the point of wanting to grow?
And if I am another one of his big jokes, why not begin to laugh right now?

Laugh through heartbreaks and failures, laugh as the years pile up and my fingers cripple to arthritis, laugh as I lay in my coffin while dropping 6 feet under, and in the after-life, when we finally meet, tell him “you see, I too have a sense of humor”.