Cursed

He paused from his labor, wiping the sweat from his brow. It was hot. There was no other way to describe it. It was the heat of humid temperatures combined with a merciless sun and a cloudless sky. He turned back to look behind him, his feet making little clouds of dust. It had been months since the last rain, but if he didn't get the seed in the ground, he wouldn't have anything when the rains did come. If they ever came again. 

Life seemed to be nothing but one hardship after another. He had never expected an easy road in life, but he had never dreamed that he would have had the difficulties he encountered in his life. Nothing had prepared him for the heartache, the despair. But somehow, he still kept going. Even he was amazed, he would have predicted that he would have died long ago. But God had other plans for him it seemed.

Laughing out loud, a little sun-crazy, he shook his head. If anything, he was God's joke. Proof that God was not a just God, but then he never expected Justice. He had never expected anything really, he had just wanted the opportunity to succeed. Some days he felt that even that was beyond him. 

When he was a young man, he had wanted a family, a good job, and the other things that came with it. He had married the love of his life, and they had had a number of happy years together. But they couldn't seem to get pregnant. That was the high point of his life. From there it was completely downhill. The fighting started soon after, they had pinned so much on having children, what should have been a joyous occasion had turned the relationship into one of trouble. She blamed him, he blamed her. They got tested. He was barren. 

It didn't take her two weeks to leave. He sat in the empty house, listening to echoes of happiness past and future. It was all gone now. He tried to pull his life back together, but something had changed inside of him. The things of his dreams were now false. He no longer knew what to believe. 

So he just kept going to work, using that as some sort of stability in his life. Then the economy tanked and his company went under. There were no other jobs available in his field in the area. So he scraped together and moved back home. 

Years went by, he went from job to job, relationship to relationship, never finding the satisfaction he searched for. He never found anything to fill the hole inside him. He never gave up. He kept looking. 

Finally, he found himself, broke, poor, lonely and all he had to his name was a small parcel of land. 

And so he found himself living in a shed with no power, no running water, tilling a land of dust by hand in a last ditch effort to stave off death. And he simply couldn't help but wonder "Why me?". He hadn't made bad decisions in his life, but it seemed like nothing ever worked out for him the way it should have. He was intelligent enough to have been successful, but he never was. He was nice enough to have been able to find company, but it never worked. He never found anyone he could spend time with. 

Thus he was here, tilling the soil, wondering where he had fucked up. What had he done wrong in life to deserve such a lot? And still he toiled, and the sun beat down uncaring, merciless.