The Poetry Snapshot: Instructions for Life

Manuals to assemble furniture.
Guides to care for pets.
Directions to wash your clothes.
Recipes to cook your food.

Unlike everything else,
your life does not come with instructions.
No singular timeline to follow,
or levels to unlock like a game.

Easy enough, your life is yours to live.

But it’s easy to get lost in freedom.
When you were younger,
the hardest choices were in Choose your Own Adventure books.
Now, every decision becomes a spiraling void,
and you become stuck at every fork in the road.

So you put your head down.
You forget about the sunrise in the horizon,
and just see the stone beneath your feet.
You take one step to a dead end,
and another to a cliff.

Oh, how I wish my life came with instructions.