A few months ago, I was listening to a radio morning DJ describe a police chase in a morning news bulletin. He described how the chase went on for a good twenty minutes, the perpetrator careening around curves at ridiculous speeds. Coming to some sort of road block, the man halted the vehicle and began to flee from the police on foot. He was captured, of course — but despite that, I thought: “How exciting.”
How exciting, I thought.
I was jealous of this man, this criminal — for the thrill of the chase, the run FOR HIS LIFE. Terrifying, exhilarating. Clearly, he had wronged someone. He had broken laws. He was in deep, deep shit. But for those few minutes, he must have felt so alive.
How exciting.
That’s how restless I am.
Sometimes I look around and wonder how everybody does it. Are you all happy, or are you just better at faking it? The majority of people live their entire lives without following their dreams, and yet, everyone seems completely fine by it. I was asking this of my father yesterday at dinner. My hands interlaced around my pint of beer, asking, why am I like this? Where did I learn this? Most people seem okay by staying put, working their somewhat fulfilling jobs. I have entire months where the desire to leave everything and go somewhere adventurous is so intense I can barely stand it. And I WEAR IT. I wear the feeling. It shows on my face, and in my missed work deadlines, and my increased alcohol consumption. I feel like this desire, this thing that people keep locked in their pockets, I have tattooed all over myself. The spans of time in between those months have moved closer and closer, fusing together to a point of near constant agitation. It starts to become more real. I start to think of the logistics. It sounds romantic and passionate, but it ends up being very stressful, like an itch I’m not allowing myself to scratch just yet.
My father, left-brained and logical, responded in the only way he knew how. I needed to be realistic, I needed to have a steady income, and I needed health insurance. I wasn’t expecting anything else from him. My mother would have said the same exact thing. Somewhere in the family tree there must have been some sort of flighty wanderer, because I didn’t inherit this from either of them.
Like, I these neurotic notions, like: “What if I never see China?”
I worry about these things. Does anyone else worry about these things?
It’s not: “I’d really like to see China someday.”
It’s: “If I don’t see China someday, I feel like I might die.”
And I’m not sure what this means. There is so much world out there that I haven’t seen, and the idea that I’m not out there in it, RIGHT NOW, causes me physical pain.
It’s elementary. Simplistic. The truth almost always is.
