Waiting

She waits. She waits through nights darker than black beetle’s wings and days hotter than the highest desert.

She sits. She sits in her chair that she has been sitting in for as long as she remembers and some time before that. Still she sits in the chair. It is the hardest chair, she thinks sometimes. And others, it is the softest. It is the only chair she knows.

For so long she has sat there, waiting. Waiting. Sometimes she is patient and sits quietly, dreaming. Others she is frustrated and drums her feet on the hot ground as if she could beat the longness of time from the dirt. In the time when she is between, she sometimes dares to sing. To pass the time she makes up tunes. There is one song she sings on days when storms are lurking over her head, ready to strike and destroy. One song she sings when she feels like crying without reason and her mind feels numb and she wants, she yearns so hard. But when she tries to remember what it is she wants so badly, what she knows would complete her, she can’t. Her head is empty, drained. So she sits there, feeling foolish, but still wanting, ever wanting. And she sings to break the always present silence.

Some days she remembers the melody different then on others, but she knows it is the same song. She believes she did not make this one up, but rather someone sang it to her, someone beyond remembering, and yet remembered. Someone soft and still. She wonders if the person who sang this song is the one she is waiting for.

Waiting. She wonders about that, too. Why she is waiting, when she began. Who she is waiting for.

In one night, black and thick as blood, she dreams. She does not dream often.

She is strangling, she is dying. There is air around her but it refuses to let her breath. Her throat is choked and closing and she is panicked, so scared, so scared. It is ending, everything is ending and all the waiting has been in vain. Nothing, no one, has come. They never came.

And then there is something suddenly. It starts off small and grows into a person and then there is a man in front of her with a face like she has yearned for.

Breathe, he says simply and she does. One clear breath that fills her up and she can stand steady and watch him.

I knew you would come, she says. In anticipating the moment, she had imagined that she would be perfect. Perhaps she would cry or faint or be dignified. But not this matter of fact state. Where was the excitement? Where was the joy? I waited for you.

The man shakes no. You did not wait for me. For something else.

She understands. She has been waiting for something much bigger than a man.

So long you have been waiting, the men tell her. For suddenly, they are men. Thousands and thousands of men, filling all space. For a moment, she thinks she recognizes a face, but the moment is suddenly gone.

Why not go out and look for it? The men say. And they are gone and she can see herself, sleeping in her chair. She could go out and get her dream. She could leave her chair and find what she had waited for, and the beautiful man who had given her breath, too.

A breeze starts and she wakes up in her chair. She blinks at the part of the sky that is starting to remind her of light. She rubs at her throat, remembering something. Something like choking, like no air. But no. There was nothing.

She waits.