I wake up to the same sight as always, a shoddy white night table by the side of my bed with a small round clock perched on it ringing like an army of squealing mice. I hit the top of the clock to silence it. The routine of waking up every morning to go to the same place and do the same thing has already damped my spirit. I feel as though I've been tied down and latched in a place that I only meant to be for a short while. Sure work pays well, and its not to bad hours; but when will I be young enough to travel again and really enjoy it? To do all the things I dreamed of in my innocent youth?
I'm almost thirty years old now and I feel as though I'm the old man reflecting to grandchildren and great-grandchildren of my childhood. Weren't we all told to celebrate life at one point? To live life to the fullest and to chase our dreams. I know I never had a dream of waking up everyday to crunch numbers in some twenty-story office building with large tinted windows, if anything I feel as though I'm in a nightmare. I think its time to take leave from work for awhile, I think its time to take a break from the hassles of life that bound and gag my dreams and shove me into a world I don't enjoy. I stumble down the squeaky aged wood steps. In the kitchen my laptop is already open, waiting for me to make my next move. I pop open a window and head to a site I had seen advertised on the web the night before.
Its all come down to a call to action. How soon should I schedule my leave? how long should I leave for? And more importantly where should I go? I continuously click on page after page of resorts all over the world. The clocks ticking makes me nervous, I should be getting ready for work.
As the steam from the showers raises my brain for the dead like the Frankenstein monster I begin to ponder my choice again. Are my friends from college in the same position? Have they been waking up every morning thinking the same thing but not done anything about it? I'm going to call them, make this our road trip after college. I haven't seen some of them in almost two years now but there is still that key website that has made it through all the changes.
When I finish my shower I log in, “you have 56 new notifications”, social networking has lost its big attraction. Nobody I want to talk to, what a surprise. I click to my friend Drew's wall. I start off the message with a “YOOOOO” followed by a couple of inside jokes. I finally set it in motion, that's enough for one day. I grab my keys off the hook and wander out the door. The day is brighter, everything seems better in an unexplainable way. Everything seems different.
Jordan,
ReplyDeleteYour prose is felt with a sense of dread, in a way reminding me of Joan Didion, one of my favorite writers. Although your dread is a bit more explicit, I think if you find ways to make it more subtle your work will take on a more haunting feeling.
Although you have a "solution" near the end, I wonder how you really feel about that as a solution. Is merely the thought of such a thing comforting, or only when it actually happens? Does the fact that such a thing is merely temporary make it worse, better?
One thing to make sure is to look a little closer over it. There are a few things here that you could fix if caught, like a couple syntax and spelling errors.
All in all though, the content is great. The picture adds appropriate illustration to the tone of the piece: frustration and mild regret.
Good work, keep it coming.
-F