Topeka

When I hear the word, or think of the place, my stomach knots up and starts to drop away.
At some point in every week, I wonder if I'm making the right choices, doing the right things, if I am actually a good person.
Topeka makes me sick because I know I wasn't right or good there.

And yet it has brought me here. I am happy here, but I can't reconcile it with the path that brought me.
I can't accept the evil that flourished in me, in Topeka.
I can forgive myself for not meeting my own ideal,
But I cannot forgive falling so far short of it.

The forces in my life, then, came together in a particularly ugly way, but I can't see that as anything but an excuse. I should have been better.

But better might have taken me someplace else.

I know too intimately what I am capable of. My stomach knots in a desperate urge to deny everything.

No matter how hard I try, it makes me sick to think of it.