THE COIN

I live in a valley

where sameness wears the crown.

Every day is cornflakes without milk,

every day is the same gray flavor.

Here, chicken gravy gets called daring.

Chinese food—fifteen restaurants deep—

is called exotic.

But it’s not exotic.

It’s the same reheated script

served again and again.

This is a land where routine

masquerades as life,

where comfort is confused for freedom,

and security—

security is nothing but a cage

lined with insulation.

Even the house I sleep in

feels like a coffin lid.

Even the pantry that feeds me

never nourishes me.

Even the faces called family

echo louder with silence.

And hear me clearly—

I am not running from myself.

I am not fleeing problems.

I have none to flee.

I am searching for problems,

the kind that stretch my soul raw,

the kind that break me open to breathe again.

I would rather pack a car with hope,

rather sleep in the chaos of strange streets,

rather gamble with hunger,

than live through another Pocatello winter

where isolation falls thicker than snow,

and silence freezes harder than ice.

Because survival here

is not living.

It is rotting.

It is drowning in still water.

And I know there is an ocean.

I have felt it in my dreams.

I have tasted it in my chest.

And that knowing—

that knowing suffocates

more than any storm could.

So let me run into storms!

Let me throw myself into rapids,

into hunger, into struggle.

Let me taste the problems of life moving.

Better to gasp, to choke, to flail,

and still know I’m breathing—

than sit one more season in this stagnant pond.

So I flip the coin.

Let it spin high,

let it fall where it will.

Because no matter which side it lands,

it’s the same truth.

I am not escaping.

I am returning—

to air, to fire, to movement,

to the rushing current of existence.

And even if it drowns me,

so be it.

I will die swimming.

I will not rot in a pond

that never knew the taste—

of the sea.