Never Let Them Define You

WAITING FOR A SIGN

She stares out the window, leaning against the wall holding a bottle of whiskey, then takes a sip, and swaps it for the notepad on the nightstand beside her. She slides the pencil out of the coil and begins to scribble madly on the paper, shaking as she does, and her whole face scrunches up. She shoves the graphite into the paper as hard as possible, making a harsh, coarse, shiny black line. She zigzags the pencil up and down, back and around, and randomly across the surface until the tip snaps and shoots out through the room. God, I need to decompress. She tosses the notepad back onto the nightstand and snatches the bottle, then marches around her room while taking swigs.

"I'm a queen!" she sings, "yeah, I'm doing things! Lots of things." She sways around and staggers onto the floor, falling over half-gracefully, and catches herself to bring herself to a soft landing. She lays the side of her head on the floor and nuzzles it against the hardwood boards. "Cassandra!" she screeches in a broken way, "I'm winning! Yeah..." She kicks her feet around and rolls restlessly, then lays on her back, and stares at the ceiling longingly. I feel something...again, something familiar that I have felt before. Yes, I did, I felt it. She giggles and sighs melancholically.

"Ding-dong!" she shouts. "Dammit, I thought God was at the door. God..." She laughs slowly at first, then more maniacally until she's bursting at the seams, and calms herself before a deeply emotionless face overtakes her sporadically joyous one. What is the point of this? She looks at the ceiling, a plastic material that's all bumpy and looks like drips paused right before falling. The way it's random, like...the whole shape of it is overwhelming; I can't take it all in at once. When I look at the sky, I see more the longer I look at it, like my brain was just filling in the blanks before and gathering more information as I stare longer.

I can't take this all in; the means to the ends of time itself. Even the days that I'm living are lost to me as they unfold before my eyes, but I think I'm getting the whole picture, and I'm really getting so little. The world isn't a show, it's not scenes, you can't break it down, it's...infinite; inter-connected and self-revolving. You can't take anything at face value or break it apart, which is literally the foundation of science...do we have ANY idea what we're doing? Like any at all? What's an atom? What's a magnetic field and how does it work; what's our place in it, how does it affect us, and not just the fields and the waves. All of it.

"Clearly you don't know much about God," flashes through her head. Ms. Hickory...she was right; no penis, no vagina. Everything. She puts her index fingers together in the air, then pulls them apart, and brings them down and back together to trace a circle. God; complete encapsulation of existence. She gets up and tries to pull herself together, then slaps herself, and does 15 jumping jacks. Whatever, she's old, she's probably done plenty of drinking from time to time. She snatches a coat, runs out the door and jogs over to her room, then knocks calmly.

"Who is it?" says a man.

"Um, just a neighbor; is Ms. Hickory here?"

The lock clicks and door swings back to reveal a suave-looking young man with a modest suit and tie. "I'm sorry, but she's been evicted."

"What?! Why?"

"I'm not liable to reveal the financial information of my clients."

"Well, where is she? And who are you?"

"She's at Happy Hills and I'm her landlord."

"Well, you're a pretty shit landlord!"

"Excuse me?"

"You kicked out an old woman!"

"No, no, I-" he chuckles and brushes his hair to the side. "Look, she had health issues, and her family moved her to a retirement home. That's all I can say."