Waiting Room
On limbo and leaving.
Everyone I meet here is trying to get out. I am standing in the cafe as the sunlight comes through the windows and we are speaking of what comes next, what comes after. There is always an after. There is always a period beyond this, and within it we are happy, content, free. We find wherever it is we are running to. We stop waiting for the future. After, after. We look at one another and speak of next month, next year, all the places we might find ourselves. Around the room, I look into everyone else’s eyes as they promise me they are leaving. They are getting out. We are all always trying to get out.
If we are like the birds, I think lately I must be making the opposite migration, or that I have at least found myself stuck in a limbo period. It has been a long time since I left. Instead I return over and over again. To my home, to the south, to myself. I live in the past, hoping that if I take myself back to familiar territory, I too will start to feel familiar. But the days circle in and repeat and sometimes I still feel that I am a stranger inside my skin, pulling it off and uncovering someone new all the time, every day. I spent so long trying to get out of place, thinking that place would change my body, when really I fear it is my body and mind that I have for so long been trying to leave behind. To change. To make anew. To refresh. I want so deeply to feel refreshed.
Just yesterday, I was in a writer’s group where we responded to the Inktober prompt “stuck”, and I wrote the following poem, thinking of the hours I spend now between my cinderblock-walled classroom and studio apartment: I’ve closed all the windows by now, / the blinds. Let it be dark inside / this room. Let it be dark / in the evenings, in the dawn, / in the depths inside my body / that some days I feel / so deep within that I become cavernous, starless, swallowing. / I eat alive everything / I have ever loved. I make space / I grow memorysick. I hunger / for loss and I know I will never / fill. I’ll never turn / the headlights on again, not like I used to, / like I once did. October repeats itself / over and over again. I am years ago / still driving through the dark, trying / to find a way back home.
There is a piercing nostalgia that washes over me in certain moments when the light hits right, when the world seems to shine in a certain way and I feel crushingly alive. When that emotion overwhelms and I feel I will never leave it behind. Of course, like everything, it fades, but it is that feeling that I keep coming back to over and over again in search for. Here is a list of times I have felt alive: on top of the mountain, my feet in the ice, the wind whipping my hair around my neck; driving over the bridge on a crisp fall morning with the right soft song playing, a song that will always take me back; running through the dark winter night; the first time the bottle hit my mouth; sitting along the lake in Pokhara, writing and watching the paragliders; diving into the ocean and laughing with someone I loved deeply; watching the desert sunset in a country far away, in a place far away, in a landscape I never imagined myself. In these memories I am distant from everything. I exist in a liminal space where time seems to still and I stop wondering about where I am or where I am going or who will be there when it ends. I am just simply there.
I want to live like this all the time. I want to stop existing as if in a waiting room, as if every experience I have is only lead up to what comes next. I want to stay in this place. I am happy here. I want my friendships to last, for all of us to stop coming and going. I want to choose a place and set my roots there. I want to start writing again; it has been so long since I liked anything I wrote, since it felt like it mattered or made a difference. I want to be inspired. I want to give myself over to someone, to something. To anything. I want to stay. I want a reason to stay.
Where will we go next. Who will we be there. What will we leave behind. There are shadows of me in every place I have ever lived. Ghosts that haunt the memories and the hallways, and I wonder sometimes if this is why I often feel as though I am half a heart, if I have left too much of myself behind. Given too much away to other people, other places, and now there is not enough time to go back and recover. I am rebuilding. I am breaking down walls. I am cracking myself open to see what lies inside. I am exhausted. I am brand new. I am in love with everything. I will never love anything again. I keep myself busy so that the limbo doesn’t catch up, so that the stillness of these waiting rooms, these spaces that I occupy, doesn’t overwhelm me into oblivion. I am trying to look at emptiness as a blank slate, as a platform to build something beautiful. But sometimes I find myself overcome, still, after all these years and all this time, that I will be the one left behind when everyone eventually leaves and goes to that after, that next place, next space, next life.
In one of the best poems ever written, Louise Glück writes of witchgrass: “I don’t need your praise / to survive. I was here first, / before you were here, before / you ever planted a garden. / and I’ll be here when only the sun and the moon / are left, and the sea, and the wide field. / I will constitute the field.”
I would like to be like witchgrass. I would like to know my home, and to choose it. To be there at the end. In my waiting room, everything is green. The world, the trees, the rivers, the fields. Everything is awash with possibility. It stretches out in every direction and never seems to end. In this new room, with all the lights off, I pull up a document filled with words and show it to my students, who are me in one of those mind’s eye visions. I did not think I would still be here at your age either, I tell them. But still I am. Here.
Your prompt this week is to write about somewhere you felt like you were waiting. It could be a literal waiting room— such as at a doctor’s office— or it could be a space where you felt like you were waiting for something to happen. A time period. A feeling. Write about what you thought was coming next. Did it?
Are you from a rural community or the American South? Share your story with us to be published in an upcoming newsletter!
This week’s song is Cement by Killstation, mostly because I listened to it the entire time I was writing this, and then only after looked up the lyrics, which are: I feel so alone in these moments that I rest / I’m never coming home but I wish you all the best. Yeah.