The Waiting Place

Customs, bus terminals, hospital waiting rooms.

These waiting places- the in-between borderlands on the most minute scale—are all the same.

Where the carpet is always the same: strange splotches of colorless shapes.

Ambiguous art, if any. Nature-less.

The chairs are never comfortable, the magazines are out dated.

You are there, waiting for something to occur, but you are not existing in that moment because the next moment will be different, better, meaningful to you and only you.

The people who share this space drift past. 

These are people you will never remember, people who are forgotten before they have left your line of vision.

They mean nothing to you, nor will they ever.

You think, “This is not me. I am aware of my surroundings. I care about people. I am different.”

You assume that what I am telling you is a fiction- a version of reality that is parallel to you, but changed enough that it is irrelevant because you are not in a perpetual state of in-between like I am.

You assume this, suspended in the moment, waiting for my next point.

The waiting place.

You embody this space but you have not yet arrived.

Nor will you.

The waiting place is a place designed for departures, not arrivals.