When time tells you go
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- August 13, 2018
- 1514
I find myself to be scant, edgy. I’m a precipice of emotion that rises and falls like the blanket I tuck myself under most nights, my breath warm and toes cold.
Most days I rise and spoon the black granules that give me sustenance, a jolt of madness that propels me into action. I feel a cresting of melancholy, inexplicable except for everything else that explains it.
Happy but pained. Content but restless. Loved but searching.
The better half of me keeps me in check, probing my thoughts and analyzing what they mean. I look at him, and we see far beyond the track of a face and know that what causes distraction is not the other.
He smiles at me, allowing me to rest in unrest. Words are sometimes better left unsaid. I know he’s feeling the same.
Have you ever thought of fleeing comfort? Seeking out the roughest, unfinished edges in the world and allowing yourself to be cut upon them?
To walk a wide berm of concrete in a wicked wind, buildings so unfamiliar they cast shadows upon your face?
I do.
I am tumultuous and vexed, quarrelsome in my discord, loving in my irritation. I seek to stretch the boundaries of all I know and to split open the cosmos with the banging in my brain, the echo that screams back at me saying “go out and do” yet remaining immobile and ever sentient, a pulsing wound that never heals, a brightly beating heart full of muddled clarity, a yearning I cannot explain.
Each year that is added to life is opportunity to be more than we are. Along with places on my body that ache in surprisingly new ways, I find I no longer want to waste one second doing things that no longer give me joy.
I am content yet seek the disparate, the broad spaces that enfold and spit me out, a cleansing of ideas and the chasing of them.
I am too old for the lecturing and thought that one should be happy to remain in place, spinning a very small yet carefully designed web. I was meant for that in the beginning of my adulthood, the raising of soft baby cheeks and messy houses filled with toys and laundry. It was my all and my everything, and now that has passed, and I seek the sun shining on me in the most desolate of places, a grasp for the next level of meaning and madness, happiness and more.
The better half of me sees this in my eyes and has waited for it to ripen, to open. I know he has made this verdant acre our home for 30 years, seeking out the best for himself and the family he knew he would have here. He tended to his children in the way he knew best, loving them fully and worrying they knew he did his best. They fly now, far and away, on the most crushing and soft of edges in the world.
I too seek the world, the better half of me at my side as we look at the voluminous future together, our love an unbreakable thread that binds, singularly sewn through our hearts yet seeking difference to grow in-sync like a well-balanced scale that doesn’t cheat you of pleasurable weight, ideas pouring out of us like water from a fresh spring, insatiable in our thirst for a vast and open future.
I am full of unrest. Malaise. Annoyance.
Choices will come, and together we will choose to expand or remain tightly closed to change. The pushing out of the cocoon has begun. The ache for the realm of the sky, dusty streets or lush sea, an attempt at slaking a thirst that cannot be quenched.
I am calm and restless. I am perturbed and grieved. I am ready.