Tanning in the Evening Sun

Things seem impossible.
Like tanning in the evening sun.
Walking home alone around midnight I find a man laying face-first in a bush and I ask him if he's alright.
His girlfriend, a few feet away, tells me he'll try and kill me if he wakes up, if I wake him up. She has a bandage around her arm; a casualty of some sort. And I laugh and I shake his arm and he roars to life, just past midnight in the half moon light, a giant of a man with hot death in his eyes.
And then he's throwing punches. Wildly. And I'm dodging them. Like a boxer.
All the time I'm dodging punches.
Too many times I'm always dodging punches.
I need a new past-time.
But dodging what they say will get me has always been what I've done.
They tell me I can't do the impossible. But all the time I've grown up learning to do just that. Nike tells me 'Impossible is Nothing.' And I want to say that it's everything.
No it isn't. That doesn't make sense. What does any more?
A bridge falling, a plane crashing.
I still hear the screams of the dying at night.
Who cares?
Who cares about the adventures we fall into, the punches we dodge?
I've worked tirelessly only to come to the conclusion that I need to work harder in order to get what I want and need and dream. A sprinter tired and asked to run a marathon. They tell me that I can't get what I want and need and dream.
And I'm thinking, one hot afternoon, that life is good and that there is a thousand more days to be lived and in those thousand days there are a thousand more victories to be won. I'm at the pool and the sun is setting and I take out sun screen because I want to tan in the evening light.
Might as well do the impossible, I think.
And then the night comes and the vampires arrive and there is no more dreaming, not until dawn at least, and the vomit and sicknesses of reality and faith that has been lost is hung in the air like the thick haze of that afternoon. Dodging takes your breath away. The punch that hits you knocks you out.
And I want to run away again. I want to dream again. I need to be alone again.
Forty days until I leave for Europe. Forty nights of searching.
I've been happier there.
I've learned to be happy here, though.
I've taken sunscreen out in the setting sun.
They say you can't do that, that the UV rays aren't hitting you directly enough to get a tan. I've never believed in science. I've always dreamed instead. Makes it easier when yo don't think about the world around you and just...lay back and tan.