Waiting to be born.
Then you wait for the bathroom to become empty.
You wait to be old enough for school.
Then you wait for the bus.
Or the Uber.
You wait in line at the supermarket
behind a woman buying six identical yogurts.
You wait at the dentist
with the small mechanical sound of another person
being repaired.
You wait at the hairdresser
under a cape,
becoming temporarily someone else’s head.
You wait outside the theatre.
You wait for the doors to open.
You wait at the airport gate
where everyone is going somewhere
and therefore no one is going anywhere yet.
This is most of life:
not arrival,
not departure,
but the small republic
between the two.
Perhaps civilization is simply
the invention of places where people agree
to wait together.
A queue.
A waiting room.
A gate.
A red light.
A loading circle.
A body in an airport chair
holding a passport
as if identity itself were a document
that might eventually be called.
We think waiting is empty time.
It isn’t.
Waiting is time
before it has chosen a shape.
The strange thing is that
we spend our lives waiting for the next thing
and call the interval nothing.
But nothing is where the body lives.
The body waits for the breath.
The breath waits for the next breath.
The heart waits
without knowing what it is waiting for.
And somewhere,
before birth,
you were already waiting.
You just didn’t yet have a clock.
I started writing diaries from all the waiting.
Not knowing exactly what I was waiting for.
I’ve just written this one, too, while waiting for my flight at Gate 749, from nowhere to nowhere.
I hope I make it in time.