I
was staring out of the window clambering on the sitting chair next to the bed.
This is what I’d do – I would long for whatever remained outside while I was
locked away, always afraid that something important was going to happen, to
come to me, but I would be locked away in an overstuffed bedroom helplessly
watching that moment as an observer as an outsider from a distance. It would be
nap time now and I was supposed to be sleeping. I could not sleep, never sleep.
It was our neighbor lady this much I remember because I would stare out at our
own backyard hoping I would not miss the moment. She seemed pleasant enough,
this was the only time I had to be with her, my parents both working. Those
half day Kindergartens making it incredibly difficult for working parents. This
lady would always get into these one-up-manship spats with my mother, as if she
was not as good of a mother because my mother complained about my not sleeping.
Mom would just let me go, and they would get calls from neighbors who would
find me outside in my pajamas at three o’clock in the morning playing at the
curb. But my sitter she was proud of the fact that she could always get me to
sleep. I did not sleep. I learned how not to fight and fuss when the time came
and I would pretend for her very well. Listen for her footfalls as she came to
the door, she’d open it a crack to see if I was asleep. I would peer back at
her under the covers having twisted and contorted myself to make it look like I was lost in deep slumber. Sometimes our eyes would meet, and I could see
that look, that look of hunger in her eyes. That look that…
But
staring out of the window at the back yard was my sense of longing. There I
would sit watching and waiting feeling held back a prisoner locked in some
dungeon. I was, however, more fortunate than some. I remember myself doing time
in a county cell somewhere on the outside of Olympia. I didn’t have a window in
there. I didn’t have a means to watch the time slip away or to see that the
glorious moment of our definition come and go. I was fortunate. I could not
look out and long for something that I
could not have. I was therefore content to sit Hurricane like in my cell
traveling to and fro through time.
It
is purgatory enough to be locked up in my own mind traversing the distance of
here and now – but my mind as devastating as it has been is something I can
handle. I think of that phrase “it is better to have loved and lost than to not
have loved at all…” I can agree with that, it is better to experience than to
sit on the sidelines watching. But to stare out at a something a thing of
existence and to long for, perhaps it is the longing for that makes one crazy.
To understand that we exist in a finite space of calculations and exponential
variables is one thing, but to watch the variables shift and change and recalculate
– to be an observer during the time shifts. To not be able to interact but
solely watch the transformation of equations, the calculations as time
progresses to a zero point never reaching it but always getting closer. That
would be too much to try to handle. To watch your life slip away with the
probabilities and possibilities swimming in your head – calculating the chances
of predictability … to be infinite in a finite world and not to be able to
grasp onto the legs of Pythagrea but only to watch. To feel the null hypothesis
as one’s own existence to reach through time only to find yourself reaching
back. This is much too much to hope for much less to stare at outside the
windows of a jail cell. To watch others lose at love while you never have a
chance that would be worse than being locked inside my brain, that would be
worse, to not even have a tormenter to keep you company, to never have the
chance… that would be an unbearableness of being.
