Properly Relieved

A year of waiting and looking inward
writing about a heart and its fixation
waiting without hope or reason
carving a deep canal in my brain's neural pathways
an easy access super highway
built on a roadbed of repetition
a chant, a mantra, until it became
muscle memory, habit, addiction
my brain has been trained - think of it in those terms -
moving on means thinking differently, more
time in the wasteland, or building another highway.

You can begin that work any time,
but you must begin it now.
Today marks a year.
I am standing down.