You're in a purgatory that you didn't even know existed. When you were a kid, you figured you'd either end up like those guys over there, or these guys over here. You didn't know that there was a third category, kind of a miscellaneous. It's like this old TV show from the 1980's, it was about a guy who was killed in 2011 and ended up in St. Peter''s office, who told him he wasn't good enough for Heaven or bad enough for Hell, so he got to go back to 1987 and live with himself and try to correct some mistakes he made along the way.
You're clean, sober, never been in trouble with the law. You weren't a bad student, you weren't a great student. You werent ugly, but you weren't too bad. You always knew wrong from right, and you usually strayed in the right direction. You've been good to people. If you have one major flaw, its that you expect the same kind of treatment from others as you pride yourself in being able to give. Only it doesn't work that way.
Everybody you know-some you think are better than you, some you know are not nearly as good as you-is married with children. You're single and stuck. You never learned how to function in the world the way your contemporaries seem to have. You constantly wonder, "Why me? Why did I end up this way? What do they know that I don't? We're from the same streets, the same towns, the same kinds of families...did I miss a meeting?"
The truth is, it doesn't matter how you got here. You're here, and you want to be there. Or there, or down there, or over there. Anywhere but here, because here, you're all alone. It's just you. Some people dream about that kind of freedom-those that don't remember what it's like to spend New Years Eve surrounded by anything but people who love you, and who you love. You still love them all, yet they have found greener pastures somewhere. At one time, they needed you every day, for many things. Now, they have found replacements for you. It isn't like they did that consciously, it just happened. They just didn't think how it would affect you. Truth is, they figured you'd be doing the same thing, because that's what the rulebook says.
But it looks like you're the only one who realized early on that one cannot follow a set of rules that doesn't exist. And here you are, waiting...waiting...waiting for the phone to ring, for that old friend of yours who you haven't seen since their wedding seven years ago, saying "hey, come meet my kids", or "hey, I wanna see you, can you come by?" It doesn't happen. Most of the time, it's the other way around. Sometimes you call them and ask to see them, and they put you in their calendar for the first week in April. That's the earliest opening they have. You could get an appointment with the top cardiologist in America sooner than you can get an hour with your old buddy who now has more important things going on in his or her life than you.
Remember the days when all you had to do to see your friends was chuck a small rock up to their window, and there they'd be? It doesn't work like that anymore. Life got complicated, didn't it? So here you are, trying to figure out which way to go to get out of this, if there is a way out at all. You wish you could just yell out their names, don't you? You need their help, and you wish you could just yell out their names, and there they'd be.
There they'd be. |
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