Children Waiting for the Day They Feel Good

I'm waiting for something.

This isn't a comment about humanity, the human condition, my peers, or any other such thing. No. This is just me now, just me talking about me, slicing off a little piece to see what interesting things ooze out of my psyche. Bleed a little bit of honest truth onto some white paper. Digital paper. Whatever.

I'm waiting for something and I don't know what it is.

The days move more quickly now; they run together, each one bleeding into the next. It seems like I've barely had time to hit the pillow before I'm waking up again, shuffling into the shower, kicking on my shoes, driving. And all the while, I'm looking at the clock, at the calendar of my phone, as if it's still the same clock as it it was when we were kids.

Back then, we knew that clock well, didn't we? We watched it tick by, minute by minute, until it was 2 PM and class was done, and we were free for the day. It was a curious relationship, wasn't it? So eager for the day to tick by right up to that magical 2:00 PM, after which the whole fucking thing turned on its head, and suddenly, we're hoping to make each minute last, hoping to slow the crawl from afternoon to evening to night.

And now it just floods past me in a blur, too quick for me to even notice. I don't even know what week it is, not really, didn't even realize October is almost half gone until I wrote down the date. October? What the hell happened to September? I can't imagine what a drug addict goes through; I mean, this is me stone cold sober, more or less and I'm having a hard enough time staying synchronized with the world.

So, what am I waiting for? I don't look at the clock now, except in the "oh, shit, it's almost 2 AM, I should hit the sack" sense. The "goddamn, overslept again" sense. The clock isn't the frenemy that it once was, when I was a kid. But I'm still waiting, still feeling like this is a holding pattern, not the way my life is supposed to be. It still feels like I'm just ticking off the days, and that there's a date somewhere on the horizon where it'll all just be better, which doesn't make any goddamn sense, because it's not bad now. Hell, it's really fucking good right now. I don't have any illusions of that.

I mean, what am I anticipating? I've got virtual freedom right now, a complete lack of responsibility to anybody but myself. Sure, there's classes, there's work, but those things I do because they benefit me, because they're the things that I want for my life (or I want what they'll give me). It's not the same as if I was a father, if I was responsible for a human life. That's reality. That's a responsibility a man doesn't abdicate. But a job? A class? They come and go, good and bad, experiences all.

Do I feel like I'm wasting my time? I don't know. I don't think so, because there's a very real sense in the back of my mind that I know this can't last forever. Sooner or later, it has to end, and all the little bits of my life's detritus have to be addresses. Sooner or later, I'll have to stock a fridge that's more than just last night's Chinese, a carton of milk and a bottle of water. Sooner or later, it won't just be my cat and my snake that depend on me.

Am I waiting for the next phase of life to begin? At twenty-two? Christ, I hope not. I have a hard enough time remembering to feed the cat. Or myself, most days.