Watching and Waiting

Watching and Waiting. It is what she did. She was watching and waiting for the thing that would send her running for the hills. It wasn’t any particular item, not a specific habit that made her takeoff. Each time she left it was something that happened because of a gut instinct, intuition that made her think that the relationship was doomed.

Most of the time her departure would be followed by bouts of clubbing. She’d find a nightspot where she could lose herself on the dance floor. She didn’t have any preference other than some kind of odd techno beat that drew people like her. She wanted to get lost in a writing mass of bodies that shared a love for a beat.

Sometimes she’d dance with a boy but most of the time she just danced by herself. She really didn’t want to talk to anyone. She had not interest in being picked up and didn’t feel the need for company. These nights would end in similar fashion. She’d come home drenched in sweat and exhausted, far too tired to shower but too revved up to speak. But they never stopped the voices in her head, that whisper that asked if she was broken so badly that she’d never be able to fall in love again.

The real problem in her life was that she had experienced a love that was so potent and so piercing that she couldn’t stop searching for it. She felt like a heroin addict who knew that she could never go back, never experience that amazing high again but would always remember what she had lost.

Sometimes she’d just lie in bed and shiver. Invariably she’d push beyond this and her attitude would improve. In reality it wasn’t that her attitude was improving it was just that she had managed to find a way to stuff her feelings down again. Push them, beat them back, make them go away because if you cannot feel you cannot get hurt again.

When she was younger her father had taught her that life wasn’t fair. It was one of his favorite sayings. She’d ask for something, a toy, shoes, whatever only to be refused. When she tried to convince him by telling him how many of her friends had whatever it was she wanted he always said “life isn’t fair.”

Daddy was right, life isn’t fair and she knew it from firsthand experience. There was no relief, only occasional interludes during which the empty feeling didn’t overwhelm her.

This time she was trying hard to break the chain. Determined not to follow the same pattern and path she had made a point of taking the bus to her father’s cabin. It meant that she would be forced to do things differently. The frantic dancer was not going to be allowed out of her cage. This time she was going to find a way to feel good and to enjoy life again the way that she used to.