waiting for an EXIT
You are waiting. You're not quite sure what for, but you are waiting. For some tap of fate, some golden moment - something that will call you to arms or helping hands. Until then, you are a statue, patiently locked in prayer. Hoping, waiting, commiserating.
You are waiting. Whilst you wait, your godforsaken job calls to you. It's shit. You know it's shit. It is well and truly archetypal of one of those 'bullshit jobs' you've heard so much about. You go to work, you do nothing that you find personally meaningful, and then you come home. Your job is an extended form of waiting. You still find yourself everyday in supplication. "Can I do this?" "Can I go speak to -" "Can I go to the toilet, sir?" You are still at school, asking for the very functioning of your body. We should not even treat children like this, and here you are, doing it to yourself.
You are waiting. Worse this time - you think you like your job. Kiss the feet of the gods for blessing you with this work. Work is work is work is work, but you think you have found your calling. You haven't. You've found a more tasteful oppression. You've learned that it feels better like this. Somehow. If you can just convince yourself that this is it - this is what you were put on this earth for.
You are waiting. But you weren't put on this earth for anything in particular, actually, were you? You're desperate for some fate to press itself to you, to stitch itself underneath your fingers, but that's not how the world works, darling. It's already there. You are waiting and drowning your sorrows in a dingy Wetherspoons until the end of time and you keep so far from yourself that you don't realise the fate is already in your hands, pressed to your fingertips. Your god-hands pick up your pint, drain it, and leave.
You are waiting. On a Thursday you speak to your dad out of a sense of necessary routine, keeping up the rhythms of life with the people you love, but you don't really ever connect. You go to the pub or sit in his garden and have a barbecue and you never really graze past the surface connections until one day, out of nowhere, he reaches across the timeless gap and places a stiff hand on your knee. "Don't be like me, son. You've got to make something of yourself. Chase your dreams and eat the world and make something new. Don't be like me." You are shaken to your core but still you are waiting.
You are waiting. Saturdays with the lads, sometimes you go to the cinema to break the routine of pub and footie and endlessly swiping. You watch films like the Truman Show and Inception and it somehow feels like a memory. Like you've seen these before. They're stirring ancient parts inside of you: rusty cogs of godlike creation. You watch TV shows like Westworld and LOST and Twin Peaks and - there's something out there, isn't there? If only you could leave. You have a stirring sense that the world might be right outside your house and you would never know. You are waiting and you cannot leave. You play games like The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide and Disco Elysium and you wish someone would just show you the door, too.
You are waiting. The economy's gone to shit and you can't leave your house and you guess this is just it, death and taxes and all that. You ignore your god parts. You cannot be shaken by a sense that the world will soon close in over itself, seal us all into the vacuum. You are plagued by the question of the universe's expansion. If it's expanding, what is it expanding into? You know the answer is more about the space between things increasing. You want the answer to be 'into the outside'. You want to go outside, as if for the first time.
You are waiting. When you were young, people tore holes in themselves in front of you. Poured blood and trauma onto your new trainers. You were sad then, older than your years and full of grief, but part of it excited you. Not the brains on fire or the bloodshed, but the idea that there could be something else. That life didn't have to be death and taxes and boredom, but could be full of this entirely different way of being. You go to festivals to try to resurrect the feeling - bonding with new strangers every other eon. You stay up until far-too-late having Deep Meaningful Chats with them, and you think this is it, this is the new world, and then you go back to work. Dead Moments of Change. The new world is impossible, you think.
You are waiting. For some princess in shining armour to save you or some knight that needs saving. You are curled around an aching spine full of regret. Every single second of your damn life you are waiting. You never stop to see the exit signs hanging above your head. Never see the trapdoors to the underworld, or the portals to another world. You never stop to understand that the way out is everywhere - it's in your fucking hands - you just have to make it. You are waiting for nothing and nothing will come, over and over. You are a god grown lazy. You contain the power of ancient things - to love and heal and form new life - and you spend all of your time working out the quickest bus route home. You are a god and you can't even work the Trainline app.
You are waiting for some spark to awaken your circuits. Bring you back online. Eat into your fears and make one of your dreams come true. You are waiting for someone else to be doing what you should. You are hoping that someone else makes the new world whilst you hike or go for a run.
You are waiting. You are waiting. You are waiting. You are waiting. You are waiting. You are waiting.
Why are you waiting? Why are you not picking up your keys - to come back for those who do not leave - and heading out the door right now? Beauty and love like you have never known await you in the new world. A soil more nourishing than you have ever known and moonlight brighter than the sun. The crisp sheets of sleep no longer take you to different worlds but instead breathe easy. Why are you waiting? Pick up your god-self off of the sofa, turn off the TV, put down the book, stop checking your emails every two minutes, hold the hands of those you love and take the EXIT. Build new worlds with your ancient hands.