Remember when you didn’t know what it meant to have a high deductible?
Or what a mortgage was?
A time unencumbered by interest rates
Or falling stocks
A time when we could not be made
To care about a down payment
Or an overdrawn account

We were simpler then
Or were we?
We designed our own complicated
Systems of paybacks and take backs
And other invented games
Bureaucracy rules at any age

Some of us retreat to a cardboard box in the front yard
Others let bills stack like leaf piles
Hide from emails
Lose sleep
Pretend there is no monster under the bed
Sometimes I have to remind myself that
Invented rules do not decide
When I sleep
Or eat all of the cookies from the cupboard

And when I am hidden under dark grey sheets
I owe nothing