Late For Work, Again

You are late to work again. You put your suitcase in Deborah’s office and find an apron, realizing it was getting harder and harder to care about a worthless job. The mind-numbingness of so many jobs is truly stupefying to you. The only way you have found around the agreed upon system of accepting unnatural work as natural is a life of no responsibility. No one counts on you, it is only you who is mildly discomforted should you quit a shit job for another shit job. You are alone in the world but somehow, someway, you believe God will take care of you. You just know you need time to not be in time, presence of mind to see life in its true glory.

No one at the stupid country club seems to be bothered by the need to be on time for work. They just insert their whole lives, the time they go to sleep and awaken, the time they eat and bath, rest and relax- everything into a schedule and most of them seem to not mind this in the slightest. But you cannot be expected to pretend to care deeply for the transient in life. It is a pointless waste of time because once people catch on to the fact that you are faking it, they wonder if you can tell they are, too. You cannot be bothered with trying to be like everyone else. So, you are late to work, over and over and over.

It is the suitcase you bring with you everywhere you go that makes people think you are a wackjob. No one wants to upset you by mentioning that you are 5 minutes late, or 15, sometimes 30. No one says a word. You assume they think there is a bomb in the suitcase but it just contains your life. It is the rose pin your mother’s husband gave you both, it is beads from your first rosary, it is your poems. It is very bothersome to people that you wheel a suitcase around when your life obviously has nothing to do with work files. You are a dishwasher, for Christ’s sake. But the first time you lose all your stuff somehow, keeping important things close to you becomes a hard habit to break. Plus, tucked underneath a fake bottom, is a small vile of poison, just in case.

You see Kate, the snotty girl from school, playing waitress. She is comforted with every breath she takes that while she might work around the moneyed women who lunch, she most assuredly will be one of them one day, ordering soon-to-be endangered species. It is what makes her so annoying, the way she plays with reality as if the future is the definition of personhood. Who I am now is what matters, it is what creates my experience, you think to yourself for the hundredth time that day. God is going to make things happen for me, you confirm to your subconscious mind, there is never a need to fear. You believe in telling yourself the things God would tell you. It makes life more rich, helps you feel like you are creating something real, knowing deep down that life is but a dream.

Then there is Renata who doesn’t care about some future lunch with some future friends, eating future seafood or whatever. Renata present is about rent and utilities and working where the money is. The job is straightforward for her, labor for money. If she labors not, she eats not- that is the future for Renata because she doesn’t know any other way to create it. After a while, she won’t care anymore. Creativity will be relegated to drunken weekends and Christmas, just like everyone else. So, today, if rich women wanted to throw their money around in order to feel good, Renata was more than happy to catch it and continue living indoors.

Walking across the dining room, you feel proud of your improvement in not eavesdropping on conversations spoken so loudly as to invite outside ears. Suddenly, an errant golf ball smashes through one of the bay windows and with little loss of momentum, hits you squarely between your eyes, lodging in your skull. Your brain can’t handle the intrusion and calls a moratorium on all physical activities not related to basic living. You fall straight backwards, hitting your head on the fake-Persian rug. The last image you see for the next four months is Loretta King’s nyloned foot underneath her lunch table.

Being in a coma is like dreaming while chaperoned. The comatosed mind is endlessly pleased with itself, forever trying to keep you underneath your conscious self. Most of your time in your coma is spent wrestling with yourself, the desire to be happy and at peace fighting with your will to live, neither side winning nor fighting to the death. The struggle is almost for show as something bigger is at play in the human mind given a temporary reprieve from consciousness. A deep sense of presence arrives and is behind the desire to stay in the hospital bed for twenty years and the call to return the life you were leading.

Just before you awaken after sixteen weeks, you realize you achieved, in the truest sense, a life of no responsibility. You are fed and watered like a plant, no one needs you to do anything, nothing you think about has any real consequence- you succeeded at living a life of no influence. Why wake up, you suddenly wonder. Your body has been preparing for an awakening on its own, no longer your choice, but what if you don’t want to wake up? It’s your body, your mind, your coma. You wanted this. On some level, you got exactly what you asked for, a life of non-interference.

You are on the sidelines of life. You got to play in the game for a while but you didn’t like the rules and wanted to just watch. So why go back, you wonder, to washing dishes and class issues and an uncertain future? Why go back to clocking in on a time clock, to days and weeks lost to mindless work, to becoming comfortable with less of yourself? What if I could do it differently, your slowly awakening mind debates itself. If I made this happen, if I wanted a life where I was fed by food I played no part in securing, a life of no effort or consequence and here I am, comatose, you think, what if I want more? What if I want all that life has to offer, you think, what if I want to sip sweet wine and swim in deep waters, to write bad poetry and stare at trees, what if I want to feel the wind on my skin and be satisfied, knowing I was made by a creator that loves and cares for me? Couldn’t I make that come true, too?