For years, he believes he is one correction away.
A little more discipline. Better judgment. Enough money to breathe. He studies his failures and makes adjustments. Some of them work. He becomes more capable, more careful, harder to surprise.
His life remains difficult to hold together.
People tell him he has potential. They have been telling him this for twenty years.
He has begun to dislike the word.
Potential is what people see when they admire what he can do and cannot account for where he has ended up. They watch him solve a problem, hear an idea, see something he has made. Their surprise is familiar. For a moment, he sees himself through their eyes, and the distance between that man and his circumstances becomes almost unbearable.
He feels it in love, too.
There are people he still remembers with tenderness and shame. He knows where he was careless, where he was afraid, where he asked too much or failed to say what mattered. He has spent long nights examining those moments. Sometimes he thinks he has finally understood.
Then he finds himself standing among the remains of something else he meant to keep.
He can explain many of his losses individually. Taken together, they begin to trouble him in a different way.
He remembers how much he has tried.
The work done after the work that paid him. The things learned in rooms where nobody was watching. The mornings he gathered himself and began again, carrying lessons he had paid dearly to acquire.
Surely, he thinks, some of it should have taken root by now.
The thought comes quietly.
Perhaps I am a cursed man.
He almost laughs at himself.
Yet the word stays. It catches something his explanations have kept missing: the strange experience of possessing what should be enough, and continually reaching the end of himself with something essential still absent.
He knows the word cannot tell him why. His mistakes remain his mistakes. Tomorrow will still require decisions.
But he lets himself say it once, without making a joke of it.
Cursed.
Then he thinks of a man he knows. Someone whose gifts are obvious, whose life makes very little sense from the outside. He remembers a conversation they had, and the care with which they both avoided speaking plainly.
He wonders whether the other man has found the same word.
