The Waiting Game

Last night I saw the new Visa commercial. You know the one with Smashing Pumpkins' "Today" playing inspirationally in the background while people jump out of bed in the morning, ready to face the day, try new things and be better versions of themselves.

I'm fairly certain that commercial was meant to inspire and motivate me, but it did the opposite. I'm not jumping out bed in the morning. I'm not blazing a new trail or saving the world.

In fact, the things I used to love now elude me, like snowflakes melting on my tongue. They are just too fleeting to find any enjoyment in anymore. I find myself searching for a new kind of happiness in my life. A grown up kind of happiness.

I am constantly finding an exclamation point to all my question marks. A stop sign to my revving engine. I have become accustomed to my daily disappointed sigh and I can't tell you how disappointing that is.

You wait for a moment so telling, so epiphanous, and it never comes. Then you wait for a smaller moment. Something more subtle might mean more, you tell yourself. Then you wait for any moment, exasperated and aching from desperation. You start to be nicer to strangers in hopes that your karma will improve. After every sentence you speak, you pause awkwardly, hoping that in the silence it hides, waiting for a quiet minute to appear. And for a while, you actually are happier, knowing that the moment hangs suspensefully in the wings makes you think you have something to look forward to. And it too, never comes.

What happens when you are tired of waiting for that one glimmer of hope that keeps you balanced? What happens when that moment you've been waiting for actually turns out to be the heartbreaking realization that a moment like that might never come?

I'm trapped under the sweaty belly of life and it keeps yelling, "Submit!"

This boredom is good for my writing. All I have are my thoughts and this sorry keyboard to free them with.

I don't have that teathered to a rock feeling inside me anymore. There is no tension, immediacy. I miss it.

I miss longing and being unsure. All the aching questions tumbling about inside my head for hours. It’s easy to write then. Inking out the way I would get through this or that or it or him. And it was always him. I could have misplaced an arm on the way to work and it would still be about him. That was where the rawest emotions in me came from. The freshest cuts left to be gingerly dressed. The buzz in my head and the catch in my throat. I was the walking wounded, but I felt alive.

Complacency is like L.A. fog. During the day you don’t notice it because you are consumed with daily tasks and minutiae. Only when you’ve escaped the work day can you see it rising above the skyline, massive, yellow-luminous and steeping the air with indifference.

I'm plagued by a different beast now. And even though it's not one that cuts as deep, the damage is slower and more lasting.

There is a difference between stumbling into some restlessness and actually mass producing it. I don't know if my luck is just really bad, or if I am just this strange harbinger of small tragedies.

But on the other hand, would I be satisfied with a life of effortlessness?

That's a tough question. I think I thrive on the difficult, expect it.

It just seems I am always on the verge of this massive heartbreak and I can't keep myself from not just walking toward it, but running full speed ahead.