On Waiting

Essay 2

Childhoods are supposed to be about waiting. We bide our time until things start to begin (when things begin for a child too soon, we know it’s deeply wrong), worrying they’ll never, embarrassed by our greenness, envious of grownups, mimicking their flaws.

This past year I’ve been a grownup, and I’ve been waiting, separate-together with everyone I know. I’ve felt lucky and immobilised and miserable and spoilt and busy and bored, all at the same time. I’ve called on mentors and wound up advising them. I’ve read the greats and seen my pains sketched into maps. A compassless lostness in history, in space—in all four directions, in all three dimensions, cardinal, cardō (masculine), a hinge, unhinged. I’ve searched the words used regularly secularly, and found them emptied of gods either goods or bads ‘til irrelevant. See, I’ve tried to pray the quiet into motion, pleading my own ridiculousness (what a case!), using the old dictionary for the new language.

And then something finds this unmoved you, the music from the other room, the music for chameleons, and you understand you’ve been sleep-weaving, you’ve been sleep-fighting, you’ve sleep-translating all through. That it has begun, that it was you who has begun it, to speak.