Waiting

Waiting. I think of my life now as waiting for something to happen. Waiting for some opportunity to come along. I feel very much like I am passing the time, waiting for something important.

When I was little, I spent a lot of time waiting. We didn’t have a car and my mother would coordinate these complicated bus passages around town, sometimes with one or two hours wait between transfers to some unheard of suburb. I didn’t understand – and still sometimes don’t – why we would go to the trouble, just for some half-hour rehearsal segment for choir or two-bit dance recital in a mall no one ever went to. Maybe she was bored.

But I remember waiting. Waiting for the last bus on summer nights or worse – on winter nights, when the cold was so fierce that I would lose sensation in my toes. It’s very real to me – I can close my eyes and see snowflakes swirling down about me in the glow of streetlights and my humid breath condensing into droplets on the wool of my scarf, pressed close against my cheeks and lips.

I remember one time waiting late at night at outside a bus shelter and watching a woman masturbate inside. She was developmentally delayed and laughing insanely as she reached up into her skirt. She was masturbating, I suppose, just to pass the time. I was only ten years old or so at the time, but I remember thinking that I guessed she had find some way through all that waiting.