Flop

Imagine yourself as a skater:
You sacrifice year after year.
Your social life’s barely existent;
You’re focused so much on career.

You practice for hours and hours,
Perfecting those jumps and those spins.
You picture that magical moment
When the score says that U.S.A. wins!

You scrounge to afford all that training,
Your costumes are sequined just right;
Your muscles are aching and injured,
You can’t indulge your appetite.

With luck, all your effort’s rewarded;
You’re part of the U.S.A. team.
You’ll be at the Winter Olympics,
Fulfilling that long-ago dream.

You glide on the ice when your time comes;
You soak up the lights and the crowd.
You smile as your music gets started,
Feeling more psyched than should be allowed.

You focus on all you’ve perfected;
You gracefully leap in the air,
But fate, like a jester, is waiting,
And you fall right on your derriere!

All those years leading up to this moment,
All the effort, the struggle, the pain;
You can’t quite absorb what has happened –
Your dream has just gone down the drain.

But you pick yourself up and continue,
And you smile, though inside you’re a mess;
While the onlookers clap, but they’re thinking
That you couldn’t quite handle the stress.

It’s a little like life: Just consider
How we hope that our problems will pass;
And just when we think we’ve reached safety,
Something knocks us right onto our ass!

But like the Olympian skaters,
We brush off and get off the floor.
At least there’s one thing in our favor –
Nobody is keeping the score!