i

antsy times four

This has been such a strange time. And what if I was there now, how would things be different? Today I have to go, I have to. And when I tell people about this in the future, I know that it’ll be the time that I went, you know, and I know that when I review this whole episode in my head, I’m not gonna know what I did or why I did it—like they’d done something with the real Grover. But it’ll make a good story of my young adult life: “The Time I Went to Prague.” I’ll look back on it, and I won’t believe that I actually went, you know, went away.

I watched it again last night. It calms me, these people whose lives are muddled like mine. I’ve found myself at parties, recently, saying things like Chet: “In my opinion, this doesn’t hold a candle to the one six years ago. There was a horse at that one.” (Only the horse was Franka Potente.) I’ve caught myself talking to the mirror. What I might have been able to pass off as just another bad summer became at least a few years of a bad life, months of emotional paralysis that became years, the postponement of my life. (Worst-case scenario after graduation: waste your life in Houston.)

It’s been so long since I made a decision, it’s been so long since I did something I’m frightened—and fuck am I frightened, antsy times four. I was laying in bed. I was shaking (I’m shaking a little now). I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t even force myself calm with my pseudo-meditations. I had the covers over my head, something I’ve only done before to hide from the sun. My thoughts, if you can even call them that, were so fragmented and fast I could only catch glimpses, repeated words. And lines from a film I know too well.

I hate readjusting my watch. Oh, I can’t change my habits—I’ll be sleeping all day, awake all night. I’ll be hungry at five. I’ll be ready for the local news at four.

Prague. What is there for me in Prague? Places Kafka lived.

Don’t complain to me if you’re not going to return it.

We stay together out of fear. That’s all we know.

And a lot of it was shock. I’ve delayed so long, made so many bad plans, done nothing for so long, to actually make a decision was a shock. I’d begun thinking I might never leave on my own, that I’d go, well, kicking and screaming, but it’s really not as dramatic as all that. Just steps: apartment hunting, car selling, job searches, truck rental, moving.

Baltimore. August.

Filed by shaun at July 1st, 2004 under fidelite