Here I am, sitting on hold. Sitting and waiting, trying to get things sorted. This looks like it’ll be a short hold, but it could also be a long hold. Seems like it’s a holding day. Or time. Or whatever.

What I get to listen to is “Opus No. 1”, and so not much has changed there. It still exists. It still floats around. I still get to hear it. What a piece of music. So heavily ingrained in a culture and style and way of dong things, and so often not thought of. Now I get to live with it. I get to experience it as I’m living my life on hold. It goes on forever and loops around. It’s broken up into bits and pieces and never allowed to finish. Its spell is disrupted by a voice that repeats the same thing every time and everything is circular. Nothing finishes. Nothing gets to go far.

It’s easy to end up living life on hold, and that’s something you want to desperately avoid as much as possible, but sometimes you just can’t. Sometimes it just happens and it all just goes on, and then you see that you start to age. You start to get older. All your friends are getting married and having kids or not having kids, and you’re there on the phone, waiting to be connected to someone. Waiting to get through so you can discuss whatever issue it is that needs to be fixed, but you need to get the right person as you’ve spent so much of your time on hold that you’re now on some sort of legacy product that you cannot be forced off of, but has been discontinued for whatever reason. But you can’t et through to anyone anyway as the lines are busy.

You try to go to sleep but you can’t, so you stay awake and soon your bags get so big that you can carry your groceries in them. Lethargy takes over, and energy seems to be something you once understood, and perhaps had a fondness for, but is something that was left behind long ago. Or rather, it left you behind as you’ve been a sedentary part of the furniture for far longer than you can remember. Time keeps ticking away and “Opus No. 1” is never allowed to finish as it gets interrupted by a voice that tells you that the lines are busy and someone will be with you soon, and then it starts again. Did it even get halfway? You’re not sure. Maybe it did, but you’re so used to hearing a snippet of it that you can’t even be sure if that’s the whole song or not. Maybe it is the whole song and anything beyond what you’ve heard on loop for decades is just a construction of your mind. A fabrication borne from a yearning for something more than this life you’re stuck in and can do little about; a life lived on hold.

The time it took to write five-hundred words: 06:59:97

I wasn’t on hold for to long, thankfully. Got this bit of writing out of it and that makes me happy as this was fun to write.