[ WP ] The pain of second place

The race was decided six years before my birth. So I tell myself, though I know it's only part of the truth. He always took a greater interest in the running of things. I always was looking at the world beyond the curtain of trees that ran past the swamps to keep the privacy of the farm from the road. He was fixing machinery when I was in school. I was pulling weeds on another man's plot when he was learning to make sales. I can not blame crude nepotism alone, though surely more enthusiasm went to the healthy first-born's tutelage than to bringing the last son, prone to peculiarities of the mind, into the fold. It is only natural. 
 
 I will go- leave the land that I have no claim to, the landed class that I have no more place in. Like my father once did, and like my friends do now, I will work the land of others, and bring forth fruits for them, to earn the lesser part of all my labor's worth. The sweat of my brow will nurture new holdings and build new inheritances for new heirs. If fortune smiles, I may one day build for myself some measure of greater station. For the time, though, I will work. I hold no bitterness. I am denied nothing that I earned. There is no pain in second place.
