Waiting
12/23/14 21:37
Waiting. Waiting is the hardest. Confusion leads to frustration leads to anger leads to madness. Cause and effect unspool before you in a grim depressing continuum of what seems like logic. You have somewhere to be. Someone is waiting for you. The birthday, the anniversary, the event doesn't matter. This one was important. They were all important, but this one was IMPORTANT. You timed it precisely. Gave yourself a buffer. More than enough time. Yet something has happened. Somewhere, your connecting link has broken down.
You stare at the clock so considerately provided to tell you you have twenty minutes, fifteen minutes, ten, nine, eight. Gears turn in your head, an internal clock ticking ever closer towards zero, the time after which all is lost, you've missed the train, it's an hour to the next one, you're fucked. You will call. She will be tense. You will explain. You cannot meet your commitments, you cannot pick her up when you promised you would. You will be very late and clean or sort of late and smelly. You are a disappointment. A failure. She won't reject your apology. She won't accept it either. She has, in her words, every right to be frustrated. She's going to break up with you. Maybe not over this, but it's a nail in the coffin.
And in your mind, despairing, angry, self-loathing, well aware that being late now is just the latest in a series of ways you have let her down that really ARE your fault, you scrabble desperately for a reason that is not your fault, something outside yourself, beyond your control, responsible for all your miseries. And of course, you blame the trains.
All of life's disappointments can be laid at the feet of the trains. The overpriced, underscheduled, overcrowded, understaffed, noisy, rude, smelly, dirty, contagious, inconvenient, and utterly necessary trains. And you can't do anything about it, you can't take your business to Train Line B to show your disapproval of Train Line A. You have no recourse. You must accept it. Shitty train experiences are a part of life. Like death and taxes.
And all you can do is sit on your bench, if you can find a bench, if the stop has a bench, if the person to bench ratio isn't the standard thirty to one, if someone hasn't peed on the bench, or vomited on it, or worse. Sit at your bench, and watch, and listen, desperately willing the train to come to you. Like a gambler praying to cruel capricious Lady Luck, you pray to the train gods to smooth your crossing, open your path, remove obstacles, not leave you stranded in the middle of a swamp with the engine leaking oil and no one willing to explain the situation to you except (in a manner oddly reminiscent of God himself) through a garbled inarticulate message over the barely functioning intercom.
And all this time, as your mind churns with possibilities and consequences and blame…you are waiting. And waiting is the hardest.
You stare at the clock so considerately provided to tell you you have twenty minutes, fifteen minutes, ten, nine, eight. Gears turn in your head, an internal clock ticking ever closer towards zero, the time after which all is lost, you've missed the train, it's an hour to the next one, you're fucked. You will call. She will be tense. You will explain. You cannot meet your commitments, you cannot pick her up when you promised you would. You will be very late and clean or sort of late and smelly. You are a disappointment. A failure. She won't reject your apology. She won't accept it either. She has, in her words, every right to be frustrated. She's going to break up with you. Maybe not over this, but it's a nail in the coffin.
And in your mind, despairing, angry, self-loathing, well aware that being late now is just the latest in a series of ways you have let her down that really ARE your fault, you scrabble desperately for a reason that is not your fault, something outside yourself, beyond your control, responsible for all your miseries. And of course, you blame the trains.
All of life's disappointments can be laid at the feet of the trains. The overpriced, underscheduled, overcrowded, understaffed, noisy, rude, smelly, dirty, contagious, inconvenient, and utterly necessary trains. And you can't do anything about it, you can't take your business to Train Line B to show your disapproval of Train Line A. You have no recourse. You must accept it. Shitty train experiences are a part of life. Like death and taxes.
And all you can do is sit on your bench, if you can find a bench, if the stop has a bench, if the person to bench ratio isn't the standard thirty to one, if someone hasn't peed on the bench, or vomited on it, or worse. Sit at your bench, and watch, and listen, desperately willing the train to come to you. Like a gambler praying to cruel capricious Lady Luck, you pray to the train gods to smooth your crossing, open your path, remove obstacles, not leave you stranded in the middle of a swamp with the engine leaking oil and no one willing to explain the situation to you except (in a manner oddly reminiscent of God himself) through a garbled inarticulate message over the barely functioning intercom.
And all this time, as your mind churns with possibilities and consequences and blame…you are waiting. And waiting is the hardest.