Part VI · &
Waiting & Living
i don't remember many of the things i waited for. i remember waiting rooms. plastic chairs. fluorescent lights. ticket numbers. doctor's offices. airports. school hallways. the long drives to and from. every stage of my life seemed to have its own place designed for waiting.
it always felt temporary.
someone would call my name. a door would open. life would continue. & in that i stopped noticing that i had begun treating my entire life the same way. later became my favorite place to live.
later i would know enough. later i would have enough money. later i would feel healed. later i would become the kind of person i imag‐ ined i was supposed to be. later quietly became another word for life.
i don't remember deciding life would begin later. i only remember believing it. nobody handed me that idea. it just happened.
children wait to become teenagers. teenagers wait to become adults. adults wait for promotions, marriages, children, houses, retirement. every season promises another season beyond itself. eventually i stopped asking where i was going. i simply kept saying "later."
later is a strange place. i have spent years believing i was almost there. every time i arrived, it had already moved somewhere else. when i was sixteen, later looked like graduation. after graduation it looked like marriage. after marriage it became enough money. after enough money it became enough time. after enough time it became becoming someone else. after becoming someone else it became another version of myself who needed to heal. i kept chasing someone who only existed a few years ahead of me.
waiting sounded responsible. patient people were praised. careful people made fewer mistakes. thoughtful people didn't rush into things. i gathered those ideas like a child filling their pockets with stones. after enough years waiting stopped sounding like advice. it started sounding like truth. every unfinished dream became some‐ thing i would eventually return to once i had become the person capable of doing it.
the strange part is that no one ever asked me to postpone my life. no teacher stood in front of a classroom and warned me not to begin until i was certain. no parent told me i had to deserve happiness
before i was allowed to experience it. no friend suggested i postpone loving people until i had finally become someone worth loving. i arrived at those conclusions on my own. i kept expecting to wake up different. steadier. less afraid. i thought certainty would arrive all at once, the way adulthood looked when i was a child.
but certainty didn’t exist. i just kept waking up.
while i was waiting, life behaved as though it had never heard of my plans. children kept growing. parents kept getting older. friends moved away. people i loved died. birthdays continued. seasons arrived without asking whether i was prepared for them. life has never been impressed by preparation. it has always continued with complete indifference to my hesitation.
when i look backward, i remember surprisingly little of what i spent so much time preparing for. memory has never shown much interest in preparation. it remembers interruptions. my sons asking questions i assumed i would answer tomorrow. a drunken tattoo, i remem‐ bered after i got it. conversations i almost canceled, but learned they were life or death for the other person. long drives that felt ordinary until the people beside me were no longer there. entire years disap‐ pear while one afternoon refuses to leave. memory has always cared more about attention than intention.
i blamed waiting itself. i treated it like an enemy. every delay looked like fear pretending to be responsibility. sometimes it was. sometimes "i'm waiting for the right time" really meant "i'm afraid." but waiting deserves more honesty than that. seeds wait beneath the soil. winter waits without apology. trust grows slowly enough that we rarely notice it growing at all. grief keeps is its own calendar. there are things that cannot be hurried without becoming something else entirely.
i had confused patience with postponement.
they wear remarkably similar faces. they both move slowly. they both ask us to endure uncertainty. they both promise something beyond today. only time reveals which one has been shaping our lives.
i've become suspicious of readiness too. i don't know that i have ever been ready for anything that mattered. i wasn't ready to become a father. i wasn't ready to lose people i loved. i wasn't ready to publish poems that frightened me. i wasn't ready to forgive. readiness seems to arrive only after the thing has already happened. we survive, then call ourselves ready. we endure, then rename it preparation. memory has a habit of making courage look intentional.
i still wait. i wait for healing. i wait for prayers to make sense. i wait for grief to soften into something i can carry without feeling its weight every morning. i wait because some things really do require time. i no longer expect time to give me permission to begin.
life never moved to later.
waiting & living were never separate experiences. every year i believed i was preparing was another year i had already been living. every ordinary afternoon i hurried through because i believed some‐ thing greater was coming quietly became one of the afternoons i wished i could have back.
later was never a place. it was the distance i kept putting between myself and today.