The Confused Cartographer
Sixty—not a whisper, but a wall she ran into,
A heavy stop sign where the open road ran through.
The number was a lens, harsh, brutal, and grim,
Making grand achievements seem suddenly dim.
She took inventory, found the self-betrayal deep:
She hadn't just underperformed; she'd barely been asleep.
The fears came in twin strikes: a sudden, quick release,
Or twenty slow years without solace or peace.
Her savings, once steady, now a pocket of change,
Against a vast future that felt wildly strange.
The slick, fast world spun for others, young and bright,
Leaving Intan standing in a shadow of the light.
She shrank by an inch; her body was a lease
Where aches were squatting tenants who refused to leave.
She tried to laugh at humor, but the joke felt frail—
A dropped glass was quieter than the cracking of her trail.
She listened to wisdom, but all she truly knew
Was the stinging reality of a life split in two.
Then the quote broke the paralysis, piercing and true:
“Inside every old person is a young one, too.”
The twenty-five-year-old inside cried out in despair,
“Where did the control go? What the hell happened here?”
The anxiety wasn't sixty; it was the burden of eighty,
That crushing, unknowable, future-fate weighty.
Her spine protested movement, but Intan sat up straight,
She didn't need a decades-long map to dictate.
She needed the moment, the manageable now,
A 30-minute pivot to teach her spirit how
To choose her direction, to own what she could see.
Functionally confused, but moving, and therefore free.
Tessa 15 Oct 2025