You'll Get What You Put in It

     Work. Gruesome, painstaking, life-consuming work. That is the only thing I've been doing ever since I made that turn in my life. It deeply exasperates me to think that everything I am right now is not even a shade of what I had wanted to grow into.

     “Dream small, and you don’t hafta have your heart broken”, my father used to say; I can’t believe that out of all the poetic sentences I had heard throughout my lifetime, it was the one that I slowly incorporated as a mantra. I go to hell on weekdays and sometimes on Saturdays too when Annie needs a check-up. We get paid three quarters an hour, daily, so temptation stresses extra effort in saving some cash. From noon to night, I indulge myself in a sweatshop full of individuals as lifeless as me; the sound of puffing steam at the preceding room and the smell of combined oil and churning steel have done nothing but torment me with their mind-grinding familiarity in the past thirteen years. I am dead sick of the sight of this place, but I just can't risk being jobless now that Annie has another youngster on the way. Though a month's pay tightly compensates for me, my two daughters and my wife, I cannot help but be saddened with what my life has been rendered into. 

     I do not know how this all came to be. It is unfitting that I haven't the slightest idea as to why I became stuck in this blue-collar job, but that is the truth. I only know that I have always wanted to be a famous painter. I can even remember the time when it was the only goal I had in mind. I would paint, paint, paint, as if the sun would have ceased to shine if I had stopped. Alongside my newsprint papers and my brushes, it felt like I was on track in fulfilling my personal legend. I was the neighborhood's young Michaelangelo, I painted everything I saw. The trees outside, Grandma's favorite reclining chair, the Maya birds along the meadow-- you name it, and I had a painted version of it. While I was making my gifts to the world, my mother would see my face covered with different colors, smile serenely and kiss me on the forehead. “I’ll buy you a canvass if you’ll paint me next”, she said one time; she was very supportive. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that when I was younger, painting was my reason for existence. I even showed some of my works to Annie, and we'd sit at the roof of their porch and dream about where these paintings could take us.

     There is little art in nickering steel to a modeled shape, and most of the time nowadays it is the only amount I get. It serves as some sort of a teaser because I know deep inside that my cowardice was at fault for my shattered aspirations. When I close my eyes to listen, as I open them and take a deep breath in the nose, the most regretful time of day shoots me back into reality; I've done nothing but weld and snip and pound pieces of metal that become boilers of ships that I never even get to ride on. Tragically, these are the only things I'll ever get to do. I won't be an artist, or a musician or even one of those hot shots wearing finely tailored suits. Fate, as I had known it, was a gypsy in the night that took away my right to dream. If only I had put the effort back then to daze the odds and pursue what was rightfully mine, maybe I would not be stuck and held to die in this steamy, prison-like routine hell. I cannot just go on a journey now; if I left this place and took another crack at destiny and failed, what would be of me, Annie and our children then? It seems there is another thing I can do for the rest of my days; I have all the time in the world to regret. Maybe I can even weep while I'm at it. In this place I've learned that in many ways, life is the cruelest vending machine you'll ever get to see; for what it's worth, you'll get what you put in it.