At the end of the race, after it all, after all the pain and the pleasure and the thrill and the suffering and the struggling, I expect very much to be received by the Lifetime Judges with a giant scoreboard that says my name and under, spelled out in little yellow bulbs, “DNF”.

Where life is a sport, I will be joined on that day of reckoning by other fine competitors, some with very sad scores, a few with some high scores, and perhaps by a handful of murderers, narcissists, and people who condescend to fast food workers who will receive DQ scores. And there I will be, under the bright white light, a shamed and naked petitioner, a little jaundiced by the yellow light bulbs spelling out my final score: DNF.

And as the others, even the disqualified, go through and are sorted, I remain, nonplussed. And that long-lasting white shame, looking through me like an X-ray, and my confusion will be my purgatory. Somewhere in the middle of infinity, it will be explained to me thusly: You were given potential. You were given secret opportunities you didn’t guess at. You spent all your time asking exactly the wrong questions. You lived your life with so much potential, and nothing became kinetic. That’s why you did not finish.

But there will be no Do Over. I will be stuck there in purgatory wondering forever at the secret opportunities, eternally formulating questions I will always suspect are exactly the wrong questions and wondering if I’ve ever had the right questions, wondering what my potential ever was. And because it’s purgatory, I will never know what those secret opportunities were, I will never know now if I’ve ever got the right question.

With no disrespect to Canada’s favorite and much beloved DNFer, Perdita, my life will be just like that, played out ad infinitum on the giant megatron screens for all my purgatory. Brilliant potential. Awesome power. A spectacular dream. And, where life is a sport, I catch that first hurdle – whatever it was, the wrong career, the wrong questions, the wrong shoes, the wrong day – and, a sensational, blazing failure, I go down and do not finish. DNF will be my mark of Cain and my endless purgatory will be something of a cautionary zoo exhibit for all the finishers as they pass me on their way in.

SS