Panic Before Christmas

Let me panic for a moment.

The calendar on my kitchen wall says November 25th. In exactly thirty days, Christmas bells will ring across the city. Strange, how time moves like this – sometimes crawling like a wounded animal, other times rushing past like a bullet train in the night. Where there should be joy, I feel only a hollow space expanding inside my chest. Unemployment has a way of changing the color of everything, even holiday lights.

I had constructed a perfect plan, the way a spider methodically builds its web. Teach part-time at a university, perhaps. Land a corporate position before the christmas season sets in. Simple enough. But plans, I'm learning, are like jazz records – they sound perfect until the needle hits a scratch you didn't know was there.

The universe had seemed to align itself properly at first. A teaching position materialized. Other prospects showed promise, like distant stars winking in the night sky. My confidence swelled like a river after rain, and I let my savings flow through my fingers like water. I declined the teaching post in Makati, walked away from an opportunity in Clark. These decisions felt right at the time, the way dreams feel right until you wake up.

Two paths stretched before me then: a bank position with its promise of stability, and a more challenging role that whispered of adventure. Like parallel train tracks, they seemed to run forever into the distance. I waited for a sign, any sign, the way a cat waits patiently by a mouse hole.

When the bank called, time stopped for precisely one hour. I sat in my apartment, watching shadows crawl across the wall, listening to the hum of my refrigerator – that steady, mechanical heartbeat. Then I picked up the phone and declined their offer, my voice steady but my hands trembling slightly.

Now I float in this strange limbo, like a character in one of those dreams where you're trying to run but your legs won't move. The remaining company's silence stretches out like an endless corridor. I sent an email into that void, and their response came back: "before the year ends, hopefully." Words that mean everything and nothing at once.

For days, anxiety circled my mind like a hungry crow. But there's something about accepting the darkness that makes it less frightening. I let the worry come, then watch it drift away like smoke from a neighbor's cigarette. Sometimes it returns, but I've learned to nod at it like an old acquaintance who stays too long at parties.

Worry is a labyrinth with no exit, so I've started walking a different path. Monday brought a new assessment for an aviation company – something about maintaining machines that carry people through the clouds. Perhaps that's what this journey is: learning to fly by first understanding how to fall.

I'll reach my destination eventually, even if I have to crawl there like a soldier in the rain. Maybe this void, this empty space between what was and what will be, serves some purpose I can't yet understand. Like the mysterious woman who appears in dreams, speaking truths we only half-remember upon waking.

Whatever will be, will be – though nothing is ever quite that simple, is it?