Fucking Waiting
Here I sit.
Ready to move. Ready to pack my bag on Nyx, point north, and go get the woman I love.
There's been drama.
Lots and lots of fucking drama.
I hate drama.
I'm not going to bore you with the details. Actually, I can't. There are some things in life that still need to remain private, especially when they involve people I love. Suffice it to say, an emergency situation came up, and the woman I love found herself stranded without access to some pretty basic things.
She's physically safe now.
That's the important part.
But physical safety isn't the only kind of safety that matters.
She's been through some shit. Her heart hurts. Her soul hurts. And every fucking instinct inside me is screaming the same thing: Go get her.
I need to get up there. I need to wrap my arms around her. I need to help her gather the pieces of herself that are scattered around right now and bring her home.
Not because she needs me to rescue her.
She doesn't.
She's one of the strongest fucking people I've ever met.
But strong people still need someone sometimes.
And right now, she needs me.
So I was going to leave this morning. Five or six o'clock. Get out the door early, point Nyx north, chew through the miles, and get there.
Simple.
Here I am at 4:30 in the morning, winding myself up for the day. Mentally packing. Thinking through what I need. Thinking through the ride. Thinking through what happens when I get there.
I'm ready to fucking move.
Then I check my personal email.
There's a message from someone I don't know.
It doesn't look like spam.
I open it.
Fuck.
Apparently I dropped my fucking bifold outside the grocery store last night.
The bifold containing my driver's license.
My concealed carry permit.
My insurance card.
My defibrillator information.
You know.
All the shit you'd really prefer not to scatter around a fucking grocery-store parking lot.
Thankfully, someone found it.
And I genuinely mean thankfully.
This stranger didn't leave it sitting there. Didn't toss it in a dumpster. Didn't decide my identity looked like a fun little side project. He found enough information to figure out how to contact me and sent me an email.
That's a good fucking human being.
There's just one problem.
He said the best time to meet him is late afternoon.
Fuck.
Late afternoon is most definitely not the best time for me.
I'm supposed to leave now.
And immediately, because I'm apparently an asshole even when I'm grateful, I found myself wishing he'd just turned the fucking thing in at the store. The store opens this morning. I could walk in, get my wallet, thank whoever was behind the counter, get back on Nyx, and lose maybe an hour.
Instead, I'm sitting here at an ungodly hour staring at my fucking email.
Waiting.
Hoping this stranger is an early riser.
Hoping he checks his email before work.
Hoping there's some way he can squeeze me into his morning.
Because I need that fucking license.
And more importantly, I need to move.
That's when I realized what was actually driving me crazy.
I fucking hate waiting.
More specifically, I hate waiting when there's absolutely nothing I can do to influence the outcome.
That's an important distinction.
I rely on other people constantly. Hell, that's basically my entire professional life now. I inspire people. Help people. Empower people. Lead people. I depend on other people to do things every fucking day.
So saying I hate relying on other people isn't really true.
What I hate is powerlessness.
I hate having no lever to pull.
No problem to solve.
No person to call.
No alternate route to take.
No fucking throttle to twist.
There's a problem several hundred miles north of me, and every fiber of my being wants to do what I have always done when life presents me with a problem: Move.
Except I can't.
Because somewhere in Santa Fe, a perfectly decent stranger is probably sleeping peacefully while my driver's license sits on his fucking kitchen counter.
Oy.
There is something almost cosmically funny about that.
The universe has spent most of my life throwing increasingly absurd shit at me, and apparently this morning it decided subtlety was overrated.
"Oh, you need to ride hundreds of miles to get to the woman you love?"
Yep.
"Right fucking now?"
Preferably.
"Cool. Where's your driver's license?"
Fuck you, Universe.
And yet...
This stranger did something kind.
I don't want my frustration with the situation to erase that fact.
He found something important to me and went out of his way to find me. So whenever I finally meet him today, I'm going to thank him.
And I'm going to give him copies of my two books.
Maybe he'll read them.
Maybe he'll think they're fucking terrible.
Maybe he'll become a regular reader of my blog and someday stumble across this post and realize he's the poor bastard I was sitting here at 4:30 in the morning waiting to hear from.
Maybe this tiny collision between two strangers does something neither one of us can possibly predict.
That's how the universe seems to work sometimes.
A bunch of occupants bouncing around inside it, colliding with one another, altering trajectories in ways we don't understand until much later.
Maybe.
Right now, though, I'm still sitting here.
Waiting.
And I'm fucking nervous.
I'm nervous about the woman I love. I'm nervous about her emotional well-being. I'm nervous because I know she's hurting and I'm several hundred miles away instead of wrapping my arms around her.
We got her to physical safety.
Now I want to help with everything that comes after.
I want to bring her home.
And maybe that's why sitting here feels so fucking unbearable. Because for once, I know exactly what I need to do.
There isn't a complicated decision to make.
There isn't some leadership problem requiring careful analysis.
There isn't a philosophical question I need to wrestle with.
I know the mission.
Go get the woman I love.
I just can't fucking leave yet.
So here I sit.
Helmet ready.
Nyx waiting.
Pointed north in my fucking mind.
Waiting for a stranger to wake up.
Come on, Universe.
You've fucked with me enough lately.
Give me this one.
Please?
