mmmmmcv

Biding Time

There’s nothing worse.  And I do it well.

Halting everything, including the movement

of time until I’m to a particular goal that must

be achieved before I can even move.  Like stalling

until a paycheck arrives in my hands and is cashed,

when there’s no cash on hand, won’t be for weeks,

and no bank will even have you as a customer.

That’s what I’d call biding time with a lot of

unknowns, which creates an even more intense

inability to move, to literally move, much less

make any necessary arrangements that might

make things go smoothly and more quickly

once the check is in hand, or even before.

It’s just a stasis.  You’re a mannequin

living alone.  Immobile.  Asexual.

Unable to leave the apartment,

even refusing to get out of bed

unless you have to pee.  There’s

nothing to eat, a life event that,

taken by itself, would insist upon

such a stasis, but is usually, of

course, accompanied by a few others,

like, once again, the lack of cash, of any

credit, of anyplace to get a meal.  Or it’s

stsifling hot, you’ve nothing to stir the air in 

whatever place you are lucky enough to be existing,

and it is humid, and the forecast says this will

transpire for a duration.  Or it’s pouring

sheets of rain, for days, say, and you’ve

no umbrella or anything with which to

protect yourself from the onslaught.  Or

you’ve bummed up your knee by trying to

clean the dead cockroaches off the top of your

closet in your tiny apartment, hopping up upon the

sink to do so (you’ve no bathroom, no stove, just a sink

and a closet and a bed and maybe a desk), and you turn yourself

in just such a way that you fall in a twist or a split second before

intended and hit the floor and there’s such a sharp pain you are

sure that you’ve broken your leg, but it’s just a sprain, yet you

can’t walk up or downstairs or even upon a sidewalk without a whole

lot of trouble, hopping on one foot, stopping to rest every chance 

you get, so why bother?  Or if you are ill or recovering from surgery, say, 

or have a case of Covid that you are pretty sure you will live through – 

only that doesn’t belong in this category because it’s the kind of 

rest that feels deserved, that feels right, even good, no matter how 

much congestion or fever you have, and so there’s no guilt to 

accumulate just for staying in bed for a week. Or two.  And then 

there’s depression, simple, easy to ascertain, you’re down, 

and you’re going to stay down until you’re not, which will not

likely be—and we might as well say we’ve gotten to the root of it all,

the root of all evil, even—until you get your next paycheck, it simply

cannot be helped (and sometimes you’re unsure of the general timeframe

when the money will even arrive, that check may not even be an assured

thing, and if that is the case, one must avoid the stasis if one has the 

will-power to do so, because there are urgent matters that require

movement, a plan to procure some cash, so if you have not resigned into

it, biding must be avoided until money can be definitively and with 

confidence expected)—so let’s say, rather, that you expect some 

promised or earned money will arrive on some assured date—at a time

at which one can be as sure as is possible about such things—and so it is

coming in a week, two weeks, a month, then, what is there to do but

bend time, to force yourself into that timeless stasis that mostly involves

sleep, or staring at walls until you are able to sleep for as long as is

humanly possible, or mindlessly playing games on an electronic device,

should you have a working one, and you do this until the day arrives 

when you get that cash, until you recover from that surgery or that 

bum knee become operational without too much extra assistance, 

it is then that you can, at least for the length it takes you to 

find yourself in another similar predicament, snap out of it, 

you can find a bit of contentment and perhaps even happiness,

some focus, you can remain alert enough to get things accomplished, 

you can stay awake, be okay, at least for now.  The time will surely come

soon enough when you must transport yourself once again into your

time-bending stasis, when you must, until some specific moment

in a future that if you have enough determination you can bring 

that moment closer much faster by, as they say, biding your time.