An Inhuman Condition

Pacing. Fidgeting. I wander back and forth looking for any distraction – anything to pull me away from it all. I start walking, and it’s cathartic. All day I’ve wanted to walk. Like boiling water, I’ve been bubbling up just waiting for the right push to escape into steam. I circle the block a few times, and it’s good. One foot after the other in the cold – the warm cloud of my breath escapes, and I walk through it. Every four steps, exhale.

I tell myself I’m going to walk until I figure it out – that I can’t go back inside until I know what I’m going to say. The deadline does nothing, and I walk. The longer I’m gone, the more I feel the need to say something profound upon my return like Moses down from the mountain. He wouldn’t have a story if he’d come back to ask about toilet paper – they would have laughed him into exile and left him in the desert. The whole God tale seems to have worked better from a public-relations standpoint. I look around, but there’s no burning bush to give me cues.

I’m not ready for any of this, but I don’t know how to say that. It’s funny how we can just go about our business without foresight and expect everything to turn out okay like the end of a sitcom episode. I’m never able to prepare myself for the real struggles, and all the shit I tend to linger on and plan for never matters. Like bills – bills are easy. People argue about money, miss their bills and get wound up in a never-ending pit of debt. The secret there is simple – stop buying shit. Money ruins friendships, families, relationships because we’ve all bought into the trick that it’s important. The bills will still be there tomorrow, and maybe you’ll have found some money by then. On a long enough timeline, you can find a way to pay your bills, or you die and cease to care who’s bought what debt sold to this collection agency for that firm in response to a past-due purchase for some stupid crap in the past. If you buy $5000 worth of muffins on a credit card, they can’t come repossess that.

So if it were just some financial hurdle, I would have leaped blindly beyond it long ago. I’m worried at this point she might come looking for me, and I would still have no words to say and no explanation for my behavior. I mean, what do I do? I love her, but there are some things you can’t forget. They just stick at the back of you like jellied gasoline waiting for ignition. When that lights, there’s no getting away from the flames.

I start thinking I may never go back, and I concentrate on the steps to clear my mind – left, right, left, right, exhale.