Short Story Sunday #38

GO

            I am always on the go whether I have to go to work, go to school, run some errands, clean the house, or I have to help someone with something. There is no down time for me. People complain that I am constantly busy. They tell me that I need to calm down and relax. I don’t really know how to relax, though. When I do get a moment of peace, I try to find something else for me to do so that I can keep busy. I don’t like relaxing. It’s boring to me.

Every morning I wake up, I clean some part of the house, I go to work for six and half hours, and then I come back home to do homework. All my classes are online, so even though I don’t have to physically be anywhere, I get a lot of homework. I’m usually up late trying to finish, even though I never procrastinate. There is just too much to do in such little time.

So, it was finally winter break. This is the two weeks that everyone looks forward to the most; myself included. The only problem was that since I was a teacher, I got these two weeks off. So I didn’t have work. The semester ended, so I had an entire month to relax before the spring semester started. So I didn’t have any homework either.

That was pretty much all I did with my life at the time. I woke up, went to work, did homework, went to bed, and then repeat. Now that I didn’t have to wake up early every morning to go to work, I slept in. Now that I didn’t have to worry about getting my homework done by the following week, I could actually sit down in front of the TV and watch a good movie. I could make a cup of coffee and read a good book. I could start and finish reading an entire novel in one day if I really wanted to.

I wasn’t busy anymore and I kind of liked it that way.

“What are up to tomorrow? Do you want to hang out?” my friend had called me the day after Christmas. We discussed how our holidays went and called to catch up.

She didn’t work because she lived at her school, which was out of state. She had just gotten home for the holiday break about a week before and this was the first time I was hearing from her. It was hard to keep in touch when both of us are busy, let alone not even being in the same state.

“Well, I don’t know.” I sighed rubbing the back of my neck. She couldn’t see me, but I was scanning my house with a disgusted look upon on my face. After Christmas, my house kind of got a little disorganized with all the gifts I had received. I hadn’t really been keeping up with the house cleaning, either. I had been too busy relaxing just like everyone always told me to.

“What do you mean you don’t know? We haven’t seen each other since the summer. Don’t tell me you’re too busy to see your best friend.” She sounded exasperated already and we were only on the phone for about five minutes.

“No, it’s not that I’m too busy. Actually, it’s because I’m not busy at all. I haven’t really been keeping up with everything lately.” I explained.

“What’s wrong? You’re not sick or anything, are you?” she questioned.

“No,” I shook my head, “it’s just that I haven’t had the chance to relax like this in a long time. I kind of like it. And because of that, I haven’t been keeping up on my housework or anything else that needs to be done.”

She chuckled on the other end. “You do realize that you have a lot of opportunities to relax… you just never take them.”

“No, I was just saving them. Now I’m cashing them all in at once.”

“Don’t go crazy.”

“Trust me, I’m not. Isn’t that was relaxing is?”

“Let me come over tomorrow. We can relax together. How does that sound?” she suggested.

“My house is a mess…” I sighed.

“So what? I’ve seen it messy and I’ve seen it clean. Besides, you’ve seen my house. I’m pretty sure my house is much worse than yours.” She stated.

“Hmm… good point,” I muttered.

“I heard that,” she deadpanned. “What time would you like me to come over?”

“Whenever,” I shrugged.

We didn’t say much after that. As soon as we hung up the phone, I looked around my house. There were dirty dishes in the kitchen sink because the dishwasher was full of clean dishes that needed to be put away. There were dirty clothes overfilling the laundry basket and were dropping onto the floor because there was still a load in the dryer and another load in the washer that I didn’t feel like finishing. My bed wasn’t made, the living room hadn’t been vacuumed in a while, and the dining room hadn’t been dusted in a long time.

“How in the world have I been living like this?” I gaped at myself.

Needless to say, when my friend came over the next day I ended up cleaning the entire house beforehand. She was in shock, but she wasn’t really surprised. I was brought back to reality when she called me on the phone.

However, I didn’t go back to my old ways. I cleaned the entire house for my friend, she came over and we did in fact relax together. We had some drinks, chatted about school and my work, and even watched a couple of movies. The next day, I cleaned up after our night together and then went ahead and took a hot, bubble bath. It was the best of both worlds.