Pacing, waiting

My life moves in slow motion. I am here. My future, out there, impossibly way out there. There is much that needs to be settled first. Papers gathered, numbers crunched, negotiations, mediation, settlement, waiting for dates to pass, tick tock. Time strewn carelessly into the distance. Anxiety.

I feel like a caged animal who has caught the scent of the wild on a stray gust of wind. Pacing, pacing, vomiting up yesterday's stale food. Feet bleeding from pawing at the concrete. Angry, exhilarated, desperate, fully alive.

I don't do endurance well. I'm not the long-suffering type. I was reading on a friend's blog yesterday that she had assigned her class the book Night by Elie Wiesel. I was assigned that book in high school and then again in college. After two years I dropped out of college to travel. Years later I returned to another college. In Humanities, they again assigned Night and asked us to write a paper on it. Two days later I handed in a well-reasoned essay on why, while I understood how important it was that our generation fully comprehend the significance and inhumanity of the Holocaust, I would never fucking read Night again. I got an A on the paper.

So I get up each day, I go about my business, I pace. At night, I curl up in the corner and sleep with one eye open, waiting.