specificity.

If only any one good or useful thing came naturally to me.  Here I wait, here I pout, wholly without skills, wondering why it is no one praises me like my mother did.  And if only I had the time to sit in sunshine instead of traffic, to breathe in beauty and express my perspective.  But I know that even if I had that time, if I could afford it or if it was given as a gift, I'd only spend it sleeping.

Most of the time, I'm hardly listening.  Most of the time, I have no idea what you're talking about and it almost scares me how little I care.

I want to live a life of bravery.  I swear inspiration strikes my mind each day, the Hosts of Heaven standing around me, begging me, "Take it."  But it's interrupted by customer service calls. By messages.  These obligations that make up my life.  But really, when I'm honest, it's mostly interrupted by my own fear.  My refusal to move when my instincts say, "Go."  My insistence that I must be good at the things I do, which is why I'm not good at many things.

And I'm so bored of it, and so angry over the boredom.  And I don't know what to do with it, this anger.  I believe that anger is necessary.  I believe, and have learned recently, that it tells us where our limits are.  It tells us where to go.  It is natural to feel it, it is only how we react to it that matters.

So, how do I react appropriately to my inability to thrive in a situation and my handicap toward changing anything about it?  What do I do with this anger at the mere reality of having to face daylight?  At this in-extraordinary pattern of mine.  At all of this saying words, saying words, saying so many words of absolutely no consequence.  

I am unreasonable.  I am out of line.  I am never settled or decided on how to feel.  I am elated and then fall back into despair too many times to count each day.  I "kick against the pricks" of this soft suburbia, of the bottomless appetite of construction zones that devour open space.  I am livid and rolling my eyes at the voices that whine at me through this millstone called a headset.  I am arguing with lifeless stoplights.  I am banging my fist into my steering wheel and yelling at complete strangers whose inability to take a left turn are about to make me late by three minutes.

I'm always late by three minutes.

And to fix it would only take a three minute change, which I, of course, find impossible.  I find myself limited.

I limit myself.

I've been drawn to what is soothing, to the idea of peace.  To what settles my strung-out nerves.  I can relate too well lately to the embers of a fire that, no matter how much water you pour, refuse to go out.

There is a disturbed and disturbing something very much alive inside of me that just won't burn out.