Light Within Lions

The coffee drips into the near empty pot as I sit and stare at the day's newspaper. The drops seem deliberate in their pace, like pharmaceuticals into an intravenous bag. I guess this would make me the dying patient, hopelessly reliant upon the latest chemical therapy and socially accepted painkillers. My disease is the ridiculous pessimism of an over-privileged life, and I, the host, am the living cliché of a 21st century American. I've got clothes on my back, fresh milk on my cereal, and manufactured heat spilling from the vents, but all I do is wait for more. I wait for the coffee, wait for the traffic, wait for the day to end so I can return home, wait for the weekend. Is it God, or is it death? What am I really waiting for?

Oh yes, the coffee.

The front page of my newspaper is splashed with the latest pictures of presidential folly and war. I used to care about things, but even things as big as multi-trillion dollar deficits seem inconsequential now. The older I get, the more the world shrinks. The coffee is ready. I throw the newspaper in the trash and slip quietly out the door. I used to give my wife a kiss every morning before I left. I don't know why I stopped. Nothing has really changed since then... maybe that's why.

I sit on the hard plastic seat of the F Train. Almost everyone is silent, their heads swaying back and forth with the motion of the cars. Hundreds of blank, waking eyes staring down at the soiled floor beneath our feet. Many of them are here each day, riding and waiting as I am. I recognize them, a mother and her child in particular. Several times I have seen her, commuting to work with a laminated, retail-superstore name-tag pinned on her right breast. Her child, I imagine, is waiting to be left at a low-budget daycare to wait away the hours while her mother scratches at pennies.

I assume they all feel the same as me, that they too wonder why they're here, why they live their lives in accordance with this never-ending, unfamiliar beat. It's stuck in our heads, put there years ago in a time that we no longer truly remember. A time when it felt important to be here, when we ourselves felt important. We work, we ride the train, we return home. I sip my coffee. I miss my car.

I can feel the impending pressures of the day ahead beginning to build against the back of my sternum as I walk the last five blocks. I try to push it down with another sip. The drink is getting cold. My chest still aches. I think about who would find me if my heart were to give out right here. If I were to lie down in the gutter and never get back up, how many similar lives would I intersect? How far would the ripples travel?

I sit at my desk and wait for the coffee cart. I need a refill. I tap my empty mug on the edge of the pressed wood surface, the hollow dunk-dunk-dunk bouncing across the insides of my eggshell office. The screen sits blank before my eyes, a small quarter inch line blinking at the top. I find myself tapping my empty container in unison with the beckoning, electronic dash. My bi-monthly report is due. Corporate Legal Consultant is my official title. I'm here to ensure that our CEOs are being just aggressive enough to get rich, but not sued. Sixty-thousand dollars' worth of schooling in the twisted web of the United States Legal System, and not once have I felt fulfilled by my work. It was the money that I loved.

It seemed to make us happy. It seemed to seal the gaps with an infinite number of possibilities, opening doors that had always been beyond our reach. But it seems fruitless now...without fruit; all the infectious grey of the labor, with only a fraction of the fruity colors to offset it. Every day I wait for twenty-five seconds as the elevator climbs up its empty well, then walk past Barb the secretary, stopping only to check for messages and echo yesterday's pleasantries, then sit down in my oversized, rotating leather chair that supposedly benefits my spine in some way, and stare at that one-quarter inch line, blinking on my computer screen, every penny earned now being funneled into a churning quicksand of debt.