Lex Walton on “I’m Waiting For The Day”

The Pet Sounds Project is Paste’s two-week celebration of the Beach Boys’ eleventh album, which turns sixty years old on May 16, 2026.

The handsome doctor at the psych ward notes my visible discomfort with the new diagnosis: “Well, it manifests in different ways for different people, for some it is more outward behavior, for some it is more inward. Don’t think of this as a sentencing, more of a name that we can use to try to make sense of patterns of thought and behavior.”

Timpanis blare as cannonfire, announcing the entrance of our teenybopper borderline personality gladiators, touch-starved and aimless, wearing failures as coats and brandishing sickness as arms, baring themselves unflinching and apoplectic.

He sees this isn’t working and tries to search for greener contexts beyond the ones crashing down around me: “In your case, think of this as, well, a kind of Acute Interpersonal Hypersensitivity. You take in other people’s body language, the things they say, you ascribe meanings to them beyond what they intend, you ascribe intent to them when they are unconscious, you think you can know them better than they know themselves,”

Rimbaud said, “‘I’ is another,” and who are any of us to dispute that? If we barely know ourselves, how can we possibly know anyone else? Someone put cops in all our heads while we were sleeping.

I kissed your lips and when your face looked sad, it made me think about him and that you still loved him so: a look in the eyes, the shadow of a glance, a slight movement. The gears turn. They set the football up for you, promising they won’t pull it away at the last minute. I perceive this other (that I believe to share my same kind of interiority) as sad, so I perceive them as being sad about this thing, and to be sad about this thing would be a betrayal, given all the Work I’ve put in! I’ve put in so much Work on you! I’m trying to Fix you, why aren’t you Fixed? Why aren’t you Better? I’m waiting for the day you can love again, because the way you’re loving right now doesn’t make sense to me. It’s not the love I understand, so we are gonna change that.

“… and then feel betrayed when their actions and thoughts do not align with the conceptions you have created.”

He hurt you then, but that’s all gone! Get over it, can’t you see you’re the only one for me? he cries out. I put in the work, I put in the time, you can’t go back, you owe me! This isn’t the thing a healthy relationship is built on. You follow recognizable patterns, you find love every Q1 and lose it every Q3. The projections don’t lie, but it feels like Real Death every time, the loss of The Saviour, the loss of The Only One that makes it all make sense—The Only One that makes you feel like a real person. How can you go back and do it again? How could someone I thought I knew, someone I loved, Real Loved, the Love To End All Loves, do this to me? How could you do this to me after everything we’ve shared? Did it mean nothing to you? I know you and understand you and the way you think and act, and this does not align. This must be coming from outside of you! This isn’t who I know you are! 

The timpanis return, manically thrashing through the string section’s saccharine melodrama. You didn’t think I would sit around and let him take you, did you? How many times will this happen? Will the circle be unbroken? I’m waiting for the day when you can love my way, when you love as I do, the kind you Die without. I’m waiting until my time and investment pay off. I don’t want to Die alone!

It is unclear—even doubtful—if the subject wants to leave in the first place, if they have said a single word. That this isn’t all just internal reeling and process on our narrator’s part. This is why the disease is so maligned, it is not a disease of imbalance of chemicals, there is no medication or patch or powder to treat it, it is a disease of logic, a fascistic logic of ownership through assumed Divine Understanding imposed on an otherwise (more or less) healthy brain, and it is up to the individual to learn how to parse it, to hold in one hand the knowledge that the feeling is real because it is felt, and in the other responsibility and hesitation in how one acts upon it. 

Unfortunately, knowledge of the disease often complicates it, plants doubt in everything, tortures you by making you goodcop-badcop at the interrogation table present for the birth of every thought until your whole concept of mind is poisoned. Is there a worse sensation than to know you shouldn’t be feeling something, but to have that feeling still take you along for the ride? He feels the sentiment, and it slips out just as he is embarrassed by the words leaving his mouth. He knows this isn’t going to help, anger fueled by guilt at feeling that anger. The more you struggle, the faster you sink. (If you added up all the holes I’ve dug for myself desperately trying to understand another’s actions, you could base jump to China.) He breaks his voice, desperate to have the show of histrionics heard over the perceived cruelty of our fadeout on the song’s climax.

When we think we can fully comprehend another’s interiority, when we think they owe us their love and their presence, we effectively think we own them, and, of course, no one can own anyone—not in this way. What does it even mean to owe something to another person? Does anyone owe us anything? Love? Attention, companionship, trust? The thing I’ve had to come to terms with by force over the last few years is that people you love can be just that—and present veneers of normalcy—and still turn and leave suddenly without a trace. You can fall to the ground and gnash your teeth and cry yourself to sleep and pull your hair out trying to understand why, why, why did this happen. You curse the very Earth and your very own birth. Still, you have to one day understand that this is just what happens—that as much as we try, the other is opaque and inaccessible; that anyone can do anything at any time for any reason. We aren’t owed an explanation, apology, forgiveness, or any other form of placation advertised as interpersonal stability.

But time passes, people move, people change, their contexts become different, and the perspectives shift. At some point, you run into them at a party or a show or on the street, and you may even strain to recognize them. You think, That’s who this was all about back then, that’s who provoked this immensity of feeling? That’s who, for me, absence was paramount to death? It all seems so insignificant now, relative to everything that has happened since, and you are embarrassed at how you had behaved, at the ass you made of yourself desperately trying to keep them in your arms. Maybe they are with him, or with someone new, but it doesn’t matter anymore. You Waited For The Day They Could Love Again, and it has come, and now you too can love again—a love without indignance and expectation and debt, a love that’s sweeter in its knowledge of its own transience, a love not fated but chosen and cared for, illuminating, not blinding. 

Come back tomorrow to read about “Sloop John B” and “Let’s Go Away for Awhile.”

Lex Walton is an American songwriter, actress, filmmaker, and amateur carpenter. You can find her work at www.youthagainstsatan.com.

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