Still Waiting.

If today is the present, I'm thoroughly ungifted. Life, to me is like a giant waiting room with seats available for over a billion people, and almost enough room to for the rest to stand. It's crowded, and you don't know the people near you, so you keep your eyes glued to whatever worthless rag of gossip you can get your greedy little hands on, while you sip cold coffee and wait for your name to be called.

They'll periodically call names in an unenthusiastic “Mr. Or Mrs. _______” sort of way and when at last it's your turn, you get up out of your seat, replacing the magazine to the bin it came from, and squeeze your way through the masses to the counter. They write something you never get to see on a clipboard that's none of your business, and then you follow a frumpy old man down a dim hallway to a door, to which they gesture for you to enter.

Inside is a waiting room with enough seats for about 2 billion people and almost enough room for everyone else to stand. You take a seat – if you're lucky, and get a cup of luke warm coffee while you wait, uncomfortably close to people you don't know with your eyes glued to gossip and statistics of an outdated issue of Mclane's Magazine. It's a cycle that repeats for your entire life, and you go through it without ever asking any questions. The coffee gets warmer, the wait gets shorter, and the chairs get more plentiful, so why complain?

The final waiting room is your ultimate goal; because inside, there's a chair for everyone.There's books and magazines of all kinds there and the coffee is not only hot and fresh, but you get an assortment of creams and sugars to chose from, as well as biscuits and donuts on weekends. The wait here is the longest, but nobody really minds, because it's a very comfortable room, and often times you've found friends or relatives to spend your time with.

Finally, they call your name. You put down your copy of Kurt Vonnegut's slaughterhouse five, or your farside comic strip, or whatever you're enjoying at the time and you pleasantly make your way to the front desk where they write something you never get to see on a clipboard that's none of your business and you follow a beautiful woman wearing your favorite perfume down a lovely corridor to a door with sunflowers painted in it. She opens the door for you, and as you step through she closes it behind you with a lock.

You're standing in the first waiting room again, and all the chairs are taken. You get a cup of cold black coffee and pick up a ancient copy of time magazine with the covers ripped off of it and start your wait over again. You're frustrated, but you don't complain because there's a special waiting room not everybody gets to see for people who don't cooperate. Nobody likes that waiting room.

They don't even have coffee there.