The Waiting
These artificial places are where we wait for things to happen. These corridors, waiting rooms, airports, hospitals…these places made of concrete and plastic, lit with an unnatural light that makes everything feel unreal.
We sit in these places, or stand if we must, often not knowing if it’s night or day outside, and feeling utterly detached from what’s real. It’s as if life feels the need to remove us from reality while it changes the scenery. Go on a long distance flight and you’ll experience it. As you enter the airport you’re absorbed into a bubble of unreality, shuttled from one artificial space to the next. You get locked into a metal box and hardly feel like you’re moving, and then, eventually, hours later, you emerge into a new place, disoriented and confused, waiting for your life to change.
Sometimes in life we find ourselves trapped in one of these places, where life feels like it’s just on hold, and all you’re doing is waiting. Nothing seems real, nothing feels tangible, and everything is a dream, an illusion. Your days become filled with a fear that it’s all you’ll ever know, the waiting.
Of course, some things are worth waiting for, and that’s why you count down the days until the waiting will be over. For the hope that in that moment everything will become real again.
Rivka Jacobs
Another interesting and a nice use of the picture this week. I like very much how you view the individual within the manufactured and constructed world; usually stories show the point of view character or narrator as alienated and apart, critical of modern culture. You’ve turned it around here, and the first-person narrator struggles against dissolving, becoming one with the alienating structures.
In this piece, waiting is like fading into the background, it’s like losing ones identity and purpose. It’s the goals, the ideals, the destination, the hopes and dreams that make a human being an individual and give life meaning.
I don’t know if I read too much into your short-short stories, but it seems to me that you touch on fascinating and unique ways of looking at the world, and relating your experience of the world to others. It’s a natural talent.
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Nicolas Papaconstantinou
I’m a big fan of transitional places – or at least, I’m preoccupied with them. I once found the perfect term for them, but now I can’t remember what it was.
Still, I love reading any meditation on them, so thanks for this, Ian!
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