Why wait?

For the almost month-and-a-half that I haven't been writing here, I have been busy and bored in turns--too busy to write, and too bored with my life to write about it. Either way, it had the same results. Whatever I have churned out lately has been fit for nothing but practicing three-point shots into my waste basket. Not all of them went in, either.

Just what have I been doing? I have been waiting and waiting and waiting. I even know what I've been waiting for:

1. I have been waiting for the poems inside my head to figure themselves out and present themselves in their most perfect versions--ready for publishing--without any involvement from me;
2. I've been waiting for a call from someone who'll say he misses me, when I should be the one to do it, because, technically, it's my turn and it's me that's yearning, and this is the reason I don't do it;
3. I've been waiting for this year to end, so I can quit my job and finally take my master's degree in literature;
   
4. I have been waiting for my life to figure itself out while I wait in the wings for my cue to enter the stage.

Crazy thing is, right in front of me, in letter-stickers on my laptop, is a motto-of-sorts I've assigned to myself years ago--Why wait?

Indeed. It's a paraphrase of my take on regret--another promise I made to myself years ago--to only regret those things I chose not to do. Yet here I am in the sidelines. Again.

And as if my life has decided to go on without waiting for me, it just zooms by with various images I can use to write those poems--a student playing the piano on his desk top while waiting for an exam to finish, his face tilted up, features crumpled in concentration as his fingers pounded on keys not-there and I could swear I heard the music spiralling from that desk to fill the whole room--and as if telling me, "There. There. And there. If you still can't write that, then I'm washing my hands of you." (Read: Maybe poetry isn't for you.)

It zooms by until one day I look up from my lecture and I realize I've fallen in love with my students. Those little brats I've been cursing for their obtuseness, for their youthful arrogance, for the fact that at that age they know as I know it is the world that waits for them. But I look at them, I see them--the stubbornness, the assuredness, that real, real confidence that everything can and will wait--and I find myself smiling even if I insist on bitterness.

And suddenly, I'm entertaining thoughts of staying for more than a year, of maybe finding myself content in this job. And it scares the shit out of me. What do I know about being content and staying there? I've left that place years and years ago and since then I've been more familiar with the constant bitterness that comes from the inseparable combination of romanticism and cynicism. I've known happy and I've known unsatisfied, but what do I know about being in between?

I don't know. Somehow, no matter how much I hate to admit it, there might not be anything for me to do but wait. Ride it out, and wait and see.