Stop this train

Stop the train

I just want off

I just want to sit on my paint-chipped bench and feel the breeze and close my eyes and sleep.

I don’t want to fight and I’m tired of the edge. Forever almost-toppling has lost the aura of wild and new; it’s all just danger to me now. My rhyme and my jive and my smooth talk have died. My fake strong is all gone and I don’t want to be free

I’ve been 35 days at the job, and I have morphed quickly into the neurotic, nail-biting, never-say-never, wannabe reporter that must’ve been hiding inside me all this time. I’m reaching for the stars – or at least interviews with them. I have way too many ideas and not enough follow-through, but I’d rather be passionate than a really good employee. Not that I’m bad, and I’m amazed at my own actress capability in the professional field – today I’m wearing high-waist black pants, a blue turtleneck, a vest, and open-toed heels. I took a good look at myself in the bathroom today, which I try to refrain from doing on a regular basis, and saw a librarian staring right back at me. She surprised me, but I wasn’t exactly repulsed. There was something strangely natural about seeing her there. And yes, I do comprehend the oxymoron that I just fearlessly utilized.

Trouble is, I don’t know if I can write anymore.

What am I doing, trying to be an adult? What made me think I could do this? Since when are you any kind of writer? Take your pick from the latest sampling of questions plaguing my consciousness. It’s funny – I always thought that humility was supposed to be some sort of life-choice, but it’s becoming obvious that the choosing was done for me. (Wow, what doctrine does that sound like?) I have no choice but this meager, blind, step-by-mini-step lifestyle. This does repulse me.

Growing up is hard. Can I just put that out there? At the risk of unmasking my thinly veiled childishness, I have to say it.

I’ve acquired the all-too-easy yuppie addiction to caffeine, and my twice daily visits around the divider to the cubicle with the pot seem like something out of a now-clichéd existentially inclined movie, with the protagonist some sorry accountant in some other sorry cubicle surrounded by a world of grey and office blue. I try to envision the room with some red or gold or russet in the walls; some warm tones to make us look more human. Warm tones tend to bring out blushing cheeks and sparkling eyes and laughter; warm tones tend to play down the spots and the pimples and that spare tire we all inevitably have, in varying sizes. Not that we’re really afflicted with the cold tones here either – the lights are white and bright and sparkling, like so many revealing hospital lamps. They’re rebuilding something on this building, but it’s too far up for us to see anything but the cranes and platforms it takes to get there, and little splashes of paint and cement are the only window decorations for our only window. They accent the forever overcast sky nicely.

I sound like a downer. A total downer. I should really be ashamed of myself. I really should.