The Incredible Machine
It’s a Thursday with no plans. It’s raining outside. It’s a little chilly. It’s dreary. It’s been a long week. If I don’t put out something real this time, I doubt I ever will. I’ve got a lot ready to pour out. Spare me just a few paragraphs to get into why I’m here today.
Something that’s always scared me is my lack of middle ground. There is the whimsical fool who floats clumsily like a butterfly just out of the cocoon, and there is the somber, pensive one who slowly processes and feels every single thing at the pace of a thick liquid slowly staining into denim. There really isn’t anything between, barring the neutral, transparent me, who simply is there to exist, and contributes nothing either way. I really am a person of extremes. I have to get used to this.
These two sides both have nothing but admiration for the other, because they have everything their counterpart lacks, and today, the somber one reigns, and today, the somber one is at his best.
I’ve been through a lot of life lately. I think over the weekend alone, I visited the respective zeniths of everything that I can hope for, everything that I imagine to be perfect and complete and right, to the brink of despair, hopelessness, confusion, and continued hauntings of my past. I know that all sounds so dramatic, but it really was a very expansive personal ride in such a condensed amount of time. It’s what happens when you get gunned down by rapid fire surprises. I think I am through that tour through Willy Wonka’s Psychadelic Tunnel, and overall, I’m just so content and happy with it, because after all those years of stagnation, it was ultimate confirmation that I’m alive again; in the figurative sense. I had myself a spoonful of life. What’s not awesome about that?
With that noted, that means my feelings and thoughts are already primed. I’m approaching a bridge right now. I’m leaving my current job early next week, then crossing over to the next endeavor, one which finally brings promise of framing what is becoming the maturation from a pretend adult, to something that will at least resemble an adult, and be doing that whole career and family thing. I feel like everything before now has merely been putting things into place, and when I take my first step on crossing that bridge next week, it sets off a spectacular Rube Goldberg Machine. Then, bam, a few years later once everything is set off, I look up and I’ve reached all I wanted to achieve (or the end result of the things I tried to achieve) over the past few years, and am on to setting up the next pieces for the next phase.
I’m about to kick off the incredible machine and I am all kinds of anxious, nervous, and excited, but that nor all the other emotional priming I’ve been through this week is what has me postulating today.
I Don’t Move On Well
If you worked where I worked, this might seem nonsensical, but I don’t move on well. In a way, as much as I have been dying to get out, I am dreading leaving. The thing is, I took my current job knowing, from before day 1, that as soon as I could find something better, I was gone, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t meant anything to me. The nature of the work, the nature of what we do each day, is something that I believe is very significant. There is a massive gravity in my belief in significance, and I’ll touch on that later, but, for me, it frankly never was, and never could have been work that I found some significance in. In that light, I’ve always given my best effort to do the best work I can do, but I’ve never looked at what I am doing with any merit. It was just a job, and in that sense, I was prone to complain about being there in the past– merely because I have let enough of my life slow drip away, and now I’m anxious to seize. A brotha got himself all jumpy and stuff, no time for any of this waiting business.
With that said, that place rescued me. It literally caught my sinking hand and pulled me from the grave and ripped me from the Earth. I had graduated from college after spending a good year buried, and I felt like a champ. Didn’t feel like a champ after being stuck at my part time maintenance job, which I didn’t resent, but just felt that choking feeling of wasting myself. Got on board at a start-up thanks for a thoughtful professor (still there), and once again felt like a champ. But start-ups tend to not be able to pay money, you’re investing yourself at that point. I started running out of money, and I felt myself sinking back in. Had been stuck living at home with my parents, who were across the country, and just as I was down to my last $20 and hopelessness had inflated to an all-time high, I felt the firm grip crush my hand and yank, as my skin was nearly sanded away by soil and rock and earth, and there I was; resurfaced.
Day 1. I couldn’t believe I was there. Worth and meaning were instantly restored to me, but more importantly, having money again meant that my ability to live was once again granted. I know I didn’t show it, because I had relapsed into solitude and my social muscles atrophied, but I was so so happy to be there; this tall rectangle box, with rows of desks, computers, and apathetic 20-somethings meandering their lives away at 8 in the morning. I say this not sarcastically: how exciting! I was and am beyond grateful for that, and being placed there is something that nobody I worked with or who hired me will probably ever realize meant so much to me, but even then, I knew from day one that my days were numbered. I knew it would be less than a year.
Maybe that was part of what fueled my under the radar demeanor. I have had it my entire life, but on a long enough timeline I end up running out of ways to trick the radar, and people start to register that I, a very prominent and interesting person, am there. I can’t confirm it, but I think I really tried hard to camouflage myself because I knew I’d leave one day in the pretty near future, and I’m just too sentimental. I didn’t succeed there, of course, but I tried.
Life is Significant
This is where that entire significance thing pops back in. Maybe it is just one of my many quirks that makes me so weird, but I firmly believe that almost every tiny thing has significance. I’d say that it’s to the point that it influences every interaction I have, because, in my head, I am looking at every micro encounter knowing that it might influence me more greatly than anything else might in any given year.
I’m surrounded by people who are significant to me. Even with the people who work on my floor that I maybe only said a few sentences to over 9 months, I could probably churn out 3000 words of some level of significant impact or memory that they’ve imprinted– and otherwise, you might never know. And that’s exactly the problem with me and moving on in life; it makes me feel very empty for a while.
I felt empty most of today. All-in-all, I was in a very good, happy place, but as the day went on, I was walking around, seeing empty chairs, deserted desks– heck, someone could have gone up to the bathroom and I might look over there and not see them and within the feelings surge. This person is so close to being out of my life, since July, we have been able to make an actual impact in our lives because we see each other almost everyday. This will probably be the only time our lives touch. Now they’re gone.
It was like they had left. In fact, a lot of people have left that place since I got there, and it sets in on you from time to time. It makes it feel a lot more emptied out than it is. Today, it felt like almost everyone had left. It made me feel like I wasn’t really there, like I was just watching a video of a bunch of people who no longer exist. I could have closed my eyes for a minute and opened them and thought I had been dreaming the entire thing. Then I realized, this is kind of what it is going to feel like to everyone else. Everyone else will still be there, I’ll be the one who is gone. They will see my cubicle, or walk by the break room when I usually eat lunch, or take that walk back to the parking garage when they get off, and they won’t see me. They won’t see anyone. They will hear silence. They will feel nothing. They will see vacancy. and before long, vacancy will be normal, and the ability to affect each other will be almost entirely gone.
I’ll be gone. Everyone else will be gone from me.
Knowing that almost everything carries significance for me, this is hard, because there are people that I may not be very close with, but I really enjoy being around and interacting with.
I’m going to miss that. I will miss them. I will probably regret not forcing myself to get closer to those people.
Then there are those who I have gotten closer with. Some who sought me out, fewer who I sought out, and a couple where those notions mirrored each other. In some cases, the person might be closer to me than I am to them, or the other way around. Sometimes these people drive me crazy. Sometimes these people delight me. And there is even one or two cases where I feel really close to these people, and feel like I could, maybe even should, continue to be significant factors in our lives– in a ‘we were meant to have some sort of social connection’ sort of way. There’s just a lot of sentiment to handle.
We jokingly compare this place to a high school, but it really is in the sense that most of us are in similar places in our lives, and if we weren’t just ‘work friends’ we’d probably all have friendships that play out much like your high school days of yore.
I’m not expecting any of them to play out like that. Not that I don’t want them to, but I am just so used to the drift.
There is so much sentiment there. There is so much sentiment that I would like to not have to let go of, maybe I won’t have to let go of all of it, but I am not counting on any person remaining as a daily influence in my life. I know myself, and how these things work too well.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be like that, and I am just enabling self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t really know how to feel or how to act upon it. In some ways, Tuesday is far away, but I can’t stop my pace, and right now I’m only a few steps from that bridge.
And all those people, that place, that daily grind, I’ll miss.
And to a few, well, I’ll really feel that hole in my life.
And today, I’m sad.
Somehow I hold on to the idea of significance, but I expect to leave a place with no continued significance. Over many days, I feel like I built some impressive personal structures with people I consider to be friends, but then I just expect it to all be abandoned. Is that right? Is there something wrong with me?
Should I be fighting that expectation?
This is where matters of the heart and the mind meet.
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