I can easily cite the man and woman who gave me the patience I have for most things in life. Dad, Mom. Easy as pie. They let me do the things I needed to do without being enablers and hurried me through rough times without letting me ignore them. They let me brush the curls from my hair and watched me live and burn and they let it all happen to me- without letting me get too tangled up.
I can wait patiently for many things. A bus, a train, a friend to show up, cake to bake, phone to ring, package to come, a child to put together a puzzle. I am a horribly impatient lover. A horribly impatient woman when it comes to dealing with men. I have a few men to thank for this, but I'll leave their names out of the writing for now. They'll get theirs when the novel comes out. But for now, I want to talk about this impatience in a sort of general way, speak of experiences and not people.
There's the biggest one, the man who could not give me what I needed. I tried so hard to be patient, for years, I waited, carefully, never asking him for a cent of his fortune, never realizing I had my own sitting in a vault. But now I'm wildly impatient, expecting all of the men I meet to be as charming, as talented, as deep, as dark as he was. I waited around because he was worth waiting around for. If the new prospects come up a little shallow in those areas, I become so impatient. Impatient to sign them off. Completely uninterested in waiting for them to figure out where they fit in my life.
But just as impatient am I with the men who fill those requirements. My past shows it in blindingly clear colors. A beautiful singer briefly enters the periphery of my world and we're sent into a secret, perfect fantasy, nobody knows but us. We end, as we need to, and we spend two years apart. I see him again, and I'm impatient to tell him how I'm still in love with him. He tells me first. And then tells me how he's moving in with his girlfriend. I hear he's in California the other day, and I'm impatient again. Impatient for his relationship to end.
Then there was the boy. We drank slurpees and smoked cigarettes and he talked to me about Jesus and I talked to him about potato bugs and we sat on a roof together once. We danced together once. And I was so impatient to know what I was to him that I never stopped to see what he was to me. I hear now that things were different, our perspectives were skewed, and now there's a whole new kind of impatience.
I'm impatient to be the person that I'm going to be. I'm impatient to move beyond my stupid mistakes, my flaws that can never be fixed by apology or even time. Just flaws that have to be fixed by me making myself into a better person.
It's not for me though. I'm impatient to become this person because as soon as I do, I'll find the right man. And this brings me right back where I started. If I were the person I want to be, I wouldn't care about romantic love this much. I'd be happy being me. I am so impatient to figure this out. It's a vicious, vicious cycle. All the guilt and shame and regret I feel is somehow manifesting itself in my writing today. I'd stop feeling it if I thought that I could go back and do things differently. Ah, but this is just the amber moment, right? We're simply frozen, caught in the amber of this moment. All of the moments are the same. I'm just impatient to get to the next one.
