Ash Where the Promise Was
stay in school,
keep your head down,
do the work,
and one day the world would open
like a door that had been waiting for me.
They said
there was a life on the other side of effort—
steady hands, steady pay,
a home that didn’t shake when the wind changed,
a woman, some kids,
a future that didn’t feel like it could be taken.
They said dream
like it was something you could build.
So I built.
Brick by brick,
hour by hour,
paycheck by paycheck—
I built something that looked like freedom.
And then one day
a man I’ve never met
in a room I’ll never see
decided numbers mattered more than names—
and just like that
my life became a line item.
Cut.
Not because I failed.
Not because I broke.
Not because I didn’t earn it.
Just… cut.
I’ve been laid off so many times
I stopped calling it bad luck
and started calling it what it is—
a system that eats its own builders
to keep the lights pretty
for people who never touched the ground.
They told me the dream was real.
But standing here now,
at 37,
I feel like a man who walked a desert
with faith in his mouth
and dust in his lungs—
forty days, forty nights,
chasing a promise
only to arrive
and find nothing but more sand.
No water.
No land of milk and honey.
No reward waiting for the ones who endured.
Just heat.
Just silence.
Just ash where something sacred was supposed to be.
And they still have the nerve to say—
work harder.
As if effort fixes a game
that was never built to be fair.
As if I didn’t already bleed
into everything I tried to hold together.
As if they know anything
about what it costs
to keep standing
when the ground keeps disappearing.
They told us equality was coming.
That the future was progress.
That things moved forward—
But now I look around
and see laws reaching backward,
hands closing instead of opening,
freedom turning into something conditional—
and I wonder
when the hell the timeline split
and nobody said a word.
This isn’t a dream.
This is something else.
Something hollowed out and sold back to us
with better marketing
and worse outcomes.
Something that looks like opportunity
until you touch it
and your hands come back covered in dust.
And yeah—
I’m angry.
I’m angry for the years I gave
to something that couldn’t hold me.
I’m angry for the version of life
that was dangled in front of us
like it was guaranteed
if we just behaved.
I’m angry because I did.
But somewhere in all this—
in the collapse,
in the noise,
in the slow realization
that nobody is coming to fix it—
there are still moments.
Small ones.
Quiet ones.
Where I can sit next to someone
in the middle of all this chaos
and for a second…
it doesn’t feel like I lost everything.
Maybe that’s all that’s real now.
Not the dream.
Not the system.
Not the promise.
Just that—
two people
finding a little bit of peace
in a world that forgot how to keep its word.
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