Hollow Man

When your Amazon package finally arrives, the thrill of the wait is over. You could check your phone a couple times a day to see if there were updates on the tracking. Maybe it would get ahead of schedule or it might fall behind if an unexpected event came up. They removed a lot of that with their two day shipping option. You can still track the package, but there’s not as much time for it to get delivered faster than expected and there’s a shorter period of time that it’s traveling for you to check for updates on the status. You could check the status after it arrives, but the status doesn’t change and you know it isn’t going to change so it loses its luster. Plus, you have the package which is what you really wanted anyway. You order whatever you ordered because you wanted the item, not to simply track it. But now the package has arrived and you aren’t looking forward to it anymore. It’s here. Maybe it’s a new piece of clothing and you can look forward to wearing it out in public for the first time and then when no one comments on it, you can put it into your closet and sometimes put it on again, but it’s not new clothes anymore. Maybe it’s a CD if you’re one of those people who still buy those or a vinyl record and you can listen to the album and hopefully you haven’t hyped the album up too much in your head so that it lives up to your expectations. But you probably checked it out on Spotify first to make sure you weren’t wasting your money on the physical album. So you already know what it sounds like. So the record arrived and you could listen to it and dive into your inner audiophile and talk about the warm sound of the vinyl itself - but you already heard the album so it has arrived and the thrill of the record coming is over. Or you might have bought something ornamental and you get to hang a piece of art on a wall or you have something to put on the mantel. Hanging art is surprisingly a lot of work, but once its up, you get to look at it. You can only really look at it for so long, but now that’s there. Maybe when someone comes over they’ll comment on it. Hopefully they say more than “new art?” because that kind of sounds like what someone would say to acknowledge art they don’t like. But your package arrived, the wait and anticipation is over and now you have the thing that you felt like you needed when you didn’t have it yet.