One More Lap

Life feels trapped between exhaustion and failure. I’ve carried too much, thought too deeply, felt too hard, and it’s drained me in ways others can’t see. And maybe I don’t even want them to see.

Even when I feel empty, circumstances demand proof that I’ve still got some fight left. But I don’t want to fight. I want to give up. I keep searching for an exit ramp from this endless expressway, a forgotten time-out signal. Let me out. I give up. Can’t you hear me scream?

Irrelevance. Sometimes I wonder if it’s only a cynical perspective, or already a verdict. They say when we’re low, the brain edits the world into shadows, that people who matter may still quietly carry us in their fabric. Oh, but I know better. I’ve ignored people. Left them out. Forgotten them. If someone can become irrelevant to me, then surely I can be irrelevant to many. The logic stings, and the ache is unbearable. To endure it I would need a heart of tungsten. I don’t have one. I long to be someone’s steady ground. Yet even with my son, I fear I haven’t shaped him enough. I feel I do not matter.

It’s a frighteningly simple thought, to seek a button to log off. I don’t know if I’m chasing death or just weary of the drag of tomorrow. Maybe I only need a break, a crack of air, a shift in light. Maybe it’s still possible, but it feels so unrealistic.

I have no ambitions anymore, not big, not small. I understand life can sometimes just be about stacking completions. Today’s ride, today’s tears, today’s words, and letting them be enough. But for me, even completion feels hollow. Shadows of irrelevance fall across everything. The ache repeats.

So I’m making a deal with myself. Not to think of 'forever,' only of 'the next lap.' On the trainer or in the day. One more lap, one more coffee, one more page. Then decide the next. This way I don’t have to demand a grand reason to live. Just one more lap, one lap at a time.

But there’s a trick. I can’t linger in the breaks. Because when I pause, I look back. I brood over how little I’ve travelled, how nothing it all seems. So I must already be moving to the next lap before this one ends. Planning ahead, not glancing at the odometer. That’s the only way I won’t see the nothingness, the insignificance, the irrelevance.

One more lap.