Cut it out, ease it in, we’ve got to do this again

 

So I’ve been feeling lazy. I’ve been feeling trapped. I’ve been feeling tired, of white walls and shop windows and watching people live their lives from behind a counter all day. I get up, I feed the host of pets, check the messages, put on my face, get ready for work or for school. I drive on crowded highways and side streets, inching from red light to red light, get out of my car. Get back in my car, come back the way I came. I rarely see sunlight that isn’t filtered by windshields and between buildings and trees.

I talk to my friends or my girlfriend, take my face off, watch television. Talk about the news and the weather with my family, kiss my cat and go to bed. If I’m not at school or work I’m sleeping, or trying to sleep, or trying to work but too tired to do any of it.

I live a small life. I know this about myself. I have small hobbies and small needs, and keep small company and collect small trinkets to amuse myself with. But this?  This is claustrophobic. This makes me anxious, at times unbearably so.

It’s time for a change. I can feel it, running in my veins and down my legs whenever my foot’s on the gas pedal and I think about driving past the store. Just driving, anywhere, anywhere but here.  Just turning around and running away, for as long as I can go. It makes me feel selfish, two-faced. I don’t like it. But I’m tired of hating my job and having no time and making no money in any event, which makes my hating the job all the more palpable. I don’t do well in confied spaces, I know this about myself.

I spent a good portion of the day scribbling in the Survival Notebook. I’m trying to cope. It’s showing up in my writing, and I don’t like that either. I don’t like to be the one in the box, looking out of air holes, making faces out of shapes and snippets of clothing and speech. I like to write about people trapped in mundane lives scratching to get out, not being the one clawing at windows and the insides of cars. I like the abject horror of trivial every day experiences, not fading into the wallpaper behind name-tag and a college ID number. It’d be kind of fitting, it didn’t piss me off so much.

I need a break. I need a change. I need sunshine. I need a new job. I need to finish school this year, even if it kills me. Because this is going to kill me if I don’t.