The cat stops walking and I, too, stop breathing.

Everything is familiar yet at the same time foreign. Nothing is the same yet everything reminds me of home.

The comforting sound of cars roaring by, like a stream, lulling me back to the faux city I love and grew up in. The tinted orange lights, casting long and spidery shadows that stretch beyond my reach.

The bricks on the floor are arranged in a familiar way. It is the same pattern that I have seen for years, taken for granted, and walked on. The roads take me to where I needed to go and today there was a patch of floor that looked exactly the same.

The same zigzag, the same bricks, the same wear.

It took me back and I hate it.

My luck and fortune had taken a turn for the worst and landed me here, in the land of the desolate. It left me helpless and hapless, writhing in the pit of my own making. I refuse to help myself, making mistake after mistake, and refusing to come to terms with the fact that I have begun to dig the grave deeper, refusing to face the fact that I am as I watch myself dig.

I set goals for myself, planning one event after another, so that the end of the day may come closer. So that the next day may come faster. So that the months will end and May will come and it will be time for me to go home. I refuse to stay here. I refuse to like to stay here. I refuse to enjoy my time here. I plan to make my schedule as packed and mundane as possible to burn up all my time.

But, perhaps, I mustn’t. Maybe life doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be the way I say it is and make it to be. Maybe I just need to step back and see that, maybe, just maybe, there isn’t a reason to hate it here. Maybe my constant mindset of disliking this land makes it so my time here is miserable and uncomfortable.

The reversed Wheel of Fortune, the upright Knight of Pentacles, the reversed hanged man. My past, my present, my future.

I knew that the problem has always been me. It had been me from the start and it will always be me in the end. No one else is the main character of my story other than myself. I drive my own life and make my own decisions that change the direction.

Maybe I need to stop driving myself into walls and head toward the wide ocean.

Maybe I need to stop walking and just take in the view.

Maybe I just need to understand that it is useless to stop the wave from crashing at the beach.

Maybe one day I will. Maybe today is the beginning of my journey to let go of my hatred of my own failures, of the tides that washed me up on this British shore.