Impatience.
That's what it is.
Impatience.
That's the sense, the feeling, that crept into my brain tonight after I finally fed myself dinner at 9:00 pm and tried to quiet the mind that was becoming increasingly unquiet as the night stretched towards bedtime.
There are so many things to be impatient about right now.
Firstly, there's the Incredibly Obvious Thing: the pandemic. I'm impatient for normalcy, as so, so many of us are, though normalcy as we picture it is still potentially a long, long way off, and it's hard to confront that each day this situation marches forward.
I'm lucky in the sense that I have a disposition well-suited for quiet and solitude, but I'm also sensitive and empathetic to the struggles of those around me, and they accumulate on my psyche as someone who generally looks for solutions and wants to rush to help. But I know these solutions aren't solutions. Not really. They're only polite suggestions that we all know are meaningless, and do nothing to actually fix the problem. And the real problem of the pandemic is so staggeringly immense in magnitude that it exhausts and enrages me.
But secondly, there are the less obvious but no less trivial things that make me impatient.
To be honest, I'm impatient for my life to start over, and not just in the sense of the After Times of Covid.
I'm impatient as I hope for things I probably have no right and no cause to hope for, impatient for answers to questions I'm too afraid to ask. I think about Prufrock in this moment, and I think of one of the lines that has always resonated so deeply with me, but particularly right now, about his fear of forcing the moment to its crisis. And in short, as Prufrock says, I am afraid. Afraid that in taking a leap, a risk, I find out it's for nothing; find rejection instead. And so, again like Prufrock, I am paralyzed into indecision and introspection.
Lately, I retreat into the comforts of the secret favorite entertainment that brings me both joy and shame (but shame only in the sense that I truly enjoy some absolute garbage that people would a thousand percent judge me for listening to on repeat several times a day). But I do because, well, I'm alone. A lot. Days and days at a time, I am the only warm three-dimensional human in my orbit, and so I listen to, or watch, the embarrassing things because they provide a genuinely nostalgic sense of happiness. When things were simpler, and when daydreaming didn't seem quite as pathetic. I listen to early 90s slow dance songs and feel that same ache of longing that has characterized so much of my life of not-quite-requited love. I reread snippets of books I've loved for decades because they are familiar and their endings predictable. I watch the movies we favored as teenagers because they were sappy and lovesick, and wonder as I did when I was 15 whether any of that kind of love is real or possible.
And then of course, I find myself thinking in the dark after a day spent alone, "Maybe?" And then I vaguely imagine scenarios I have no reason to imagine. Stupid, pathetic, love-starved scenarios that, again, I perhaps have no real reason to hope for; surprises and grand gestures and off-the-feet sweeping has never and may never exist in my world, and I've spent the last five months sitting with that, trying to be okay with that. Yet these scenarios, however fleetingly they last on my almost-always-otherwise-occupied brain, buoy a sense of optimism that feels ... real? Somehow improbably real, real in the sense that maybe I'm wrong, or at the very least maybe I am allowed to hope for what I hope for.
That new possibilities exist and I just have to be...
patient.
We're back to patience, a virtue wearing thin on me in the solitude of a Saturday night. Oddly, I spent the vast majority of my day today plugged into the hustle and chatter of a 12 hour Zoom call and yet after a day spent (virtually) surrounded by people, I feel a keen sense of loneliness tonight, a loneliness that crept in only after I stepped away from my computer and my office and fed myself and took a deep breath and looked around my living room.
And that's when the sense of impatience overwhelmed me, but realizing that I could point to the feeling and name it felt good; it felt powerful to accurately label the disquiet I feel tonight.
So perhaps you, too, dear Reader, have been wrestling with an unnameable, abstract emotion, not as strong as fear or anger, but not as uplifting as hope or happiness. I don't feel mad, or sad, but in this moment, I also don't feel happy or optimistic.
Tonight, it's simply impatience.
