I hate this process. I hate this wait. I hate the weight of it all.
It seems as if I’m through a series of infinite and infinitely diverging serial numbers, all of them uneven. There is not a single instance of a two or an eight. It’s always seven, seven, seven, seven. Always, and always again, and it’s never getting closer. Only that it is. It’s the worst of things, it’s constantly and constantly converging, yet never closing: ever closer, but it never seems like it. This wait seems unending: it seems like every single instance, every single thing, every single atom and particle of the world is trying to hinder my path. Only that it isn’t. It seems as if I am in the worst of predicaments, as if a magnificent grail has been held in front of me, and I possess an unstoppable desire to fill it, to drop the depths of my soul into that cup and fill it. And I can’t, because someone is showing me this cup from the other side of a gaping abyss, forever and ever and ever. Tantalizing, insanely so.
It is 7 and 7, 7, 7, and 7, never 14, which is at least a prettier number. It’s always 21 and 29, but it’s never, never, ever something that…
Heh, I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore.
As I was saying, it seems as if I am going through an infinite series of divergent serial numbers. But in the end, they are convergent. It’s just that their convergence seems like it could outlast most stars. As if I could be reborn anew a thousand times and I’d still be waiting for a signature on a piece of paper or a beautiful stamp. And then they would get a letter wrong, and I’d have to go all the way back to the beginning.
If there is a hell, and I don’t really believe there is one besides the one I’m living in, it must be something pretty close to this. After all, if I were a wicked demon with pointed horns and a trident, red-skinned, dancing amidst ashes and flames, and had to torture myself, I wouldn’t get me through starvation or war, death, famine, or disease. I would just do this: put me in a line that never ends, always and forever getting closer to something that seems like it will never end, it will never come, it will never arrive.
But it will, I must believe so. And so, I try, and I try, and I try. Believing, however, is hard, and having faith is even harder. I never could. I am not a man of faith. It seems I am incapable of believing. It seems I am incapable of imagining a world where things will resolve, but I must. And I’m put through such a predicament, through such a manner of things, that I must stay strong. But I don’t want to stay strong, but I know I will, because I must. And I was never one to neglect what I must.
In the end, and that is what makes it all the harder, I know it will be… well, I know it will be alright. I was always one to arrive at my destination, and I was always one to remain strong through it. But just a little thing, just a little bit of me wish I could burst into tears, I could kneel on the ground, cracking my nails, biting sand and punching. I wish I could punch my mirror and break it, but just the thought of cutting my hands and the fragments of glass I’d have to sweep off the floor stop me from it.
The greatest burst of rage, the greatest expression of ire I could gather was this lunatic speech and breaking the little baton of lipstick.
I… It… it seems… it is so comical to tell this in such a way. When I first got the notice of the latest instance of hindrance, rage boiled within me, a cold rage, not unlike a glacier or an avalanche in some frozen mountain scape.
I wished to break something, I wish I could grab my phone and throw it from the balcony, but I cannot. I wish I could punch my mirror broken, but I cannot. I could not bear the thought of having to clean all the little shards and being worried about stepping on glass later. I simply cannot. So, I opened my medicine cabinet, and I got a stick of lipstick, an old one. And I thought “I’m gonna toss this on the ground as strong as I can and it will break in a thousand pieces”. But I could not do it before I checked the expiration date and confirmed that it was close to expiring.
And then I checked if I had another one stocked, if I ever needed it. I haven’t used lipstick in perhaps some three or four years, maybe even more. And yet I could not get myself to throw the damn thing on the floor before checking the expiration date. What difference does the expiration date of a lipstick even do? Will it rot my lips if I use it? Will it make me die or get fatally ill? No, it won’t. I know it won’t. But yet I couldn’t.
And then I took the damn thing and I threw it on the ground so strongly that it broke into some ten pieces or so. Ten, not a thousand. The thin white plastic shards filled me with relief. It was as if all sins in the world ceased to be for a little second, an instant, a breath. And then I looked at the… the little white mass spread on the floor, and I went to get a towel to get it clean. The world went on.
Then I thought about it: thinking is all I can do, really. Yet, I wish I could not think of it, at all, if only for a moment. And I know I will. I will find solace in the smallest of things. I will find comfort in a moment of unexpected release. I’ll see a cloud that will remind me of an elephant I saw in the zoo when I was but a child, and I will go back to such a memory and I will inhabit it for a millennium, then I’ll come back have lived a life in that zoo.
And a thousand more will have to pass before what I wish would come to fruition. Memory after memory, millennia after millennia, time after time, moment after moment, soliloquy after soliloquy… and yet in the end it’s still me, locked in a little room waiting for a signature on a piece of paper and a call saying things went alright. Every moment I receive a call, every moment I press the button, I say: “Hello, how are you? Oh, I’m… I’m alright. So, how’s it?” And even though I’ve never been one of faith, even though I am not able to believe in the smallest of things, when I ask about it, every single time I make that question, I am filled with an unshakable, unmistakable, unstoppable hope that goes through every pore of my body. I cannot stop it. Unfaithful as I am, I cannot but have faith. I cannot but believe that what I desire is about to come, and it never is. And every single time I’ve made that question, another hindrance has come.
And yet, every single time I ask it, and every single time I’ll come to ask it again, millennia it may take, I’ll be filled with such hope and faith that not every single god that has ever been, summed together, could evoke.
I cannot but hope that what I desire is about to come and it always is.
– Ian
