I specifically remember being told that I can’t prosper without picking myself up after failure.
As a four year old incapable of coloring inside the lines I thought they had been talking about the array of scribbles and mismatched shades in my coloring book.
By the time I turned ten I began to think they had meant my first F on the homework assignment I couldn’t make sense of.
Then when I was thirteen and tripped in front of the cute boy in my Algebra class I thought the two could link together hoping I still had a chance,
but at fifteen and chewing on the eraser end of a mechanical pencil despite the orthodontist telling me I’d ruin my braces and the tutor across the desk thumbing through my failed fall exam trying to see where it had all went wrong, I concluded that education was the failure I were to bounce back from.
But I was eighteen and moving into the dorm of a college I had reluctantly listed as my “safe” school because my advisor told me to be safe and safe didn’t seem so bad with my GPA so I told myself I could succeed with a well-paying career.
Years later as a twenty five year old and employed with the third job I swore would work and living in the apartment with broken blinds and stained carpet along with the man that gave me a shiny ring promising forever I could still remember the F on that homework assignment fifteen years ago.
When we got married I was twenty seven and I broke a plate at our wedding when I felt suffocated by the lace white dress that I later decided to trash but not the plate for its “sentimental value” and ability to remind me when we had our first kid to whisper the words of defeat and inevitable glory even though I never fixed the plate nor did I try to and it just sat there and I’m not sure why it sat there but
I was forty one and divorced when I picked it out of a box mentally flashed with the expression on my tutor’s face figuring out where it all went wrong and why I couldn’t figure out where it all went wrong. It was an endless string of questions from “I wonder what wasteland my coloring book is rotting away in” to “what the hell was the cute boy from Algebra’s name” wandering to “why didn’t I ever glue that ******* plate together” and these tears fell that I swear were the shape of question marks.
Later my daughter was eighteen with a 3.9 GPA and at her graduation I saw the man that gave me the shiny ring ignorant to the meaning of forever and I couldn’t tell anyone I only had a year to live but I did tell my daughter I loved her everyday even if it were in my head as the year passed.
I was forty six the day I fainted in my kitchen and there was cheap superglue stuck in my nails and one more discarded piece that would have completed the broken plate that wasn’t so broken anymore even when I felt broken myself and my daughter wasn’t in her “safe” school and the one man I loved was remarried with a step son who tutored kids that failed their exams which made it seem like a beautiful day. It may not look like it, but I did prosper and I did pick myself up after my failures, to the sun I colored purple to my first F to the broken bracket in my braces to my sucky GPA.
However, I did remain unprosperous from this unfinished broken plate. That, itself, strangely remained my biggest failure.
-Mars S.
a story of triumph without glory