While We Wait

The dryers at my coin laundry give you twenty-six minutes. I used to think it an awkward length: too short to start anything, too long to do nothing. I have changed my mind. Twenty-six minutes is not awkward, it is precise. Exactly short enough that nothing can be started, which is exactly what it takes to make a person simply sit.

Last week I found myself watching what the man across the row did with his twenty-six minutes. He took his phone out three times and put it back three times, read the instructions on the detergent vending machine all the way to the end, and spent the rest watching his laundry turn behind the glass. The order of it struck me as honest. We don't so much endure waiting as set things down in front of it, one at a time. The phone. The reading material. And only then, last of all, we take out the kind of eyes that can watch nothing in particular.

Waiting for a reply that doesn't come is a different machine; nowhere on it is the finish time printed. So people build their own instrument panels. Check whether it has been read. Check the last-seen time. Regret checking. I have had evenings like that. And I don't think what I wanted was the content of the reply. I wanted to know what number my message held in the queue of that person's day. The ranking, not the answer.

There is no way to learn that number. What you can learn is what you do while you wait. Some days I cleaned. One day I exercised, which I don't. One day I scrolled up and up through old messages. The waiting was the same; what my hands did was different every time. Waiting seems less like a test than like a mirror. Not what you are waiting for, but where your hands go while you wait: that is the part that shows you the day's version of yourself.

The three minutes it takes water to boil are among the shortest waits there are, and I am terrible at them. I cannot count the days I have wandered off mid-boil and ended up boiling the same water twice. A person who cannot stand still for three minutes will sit quietly for twenty-six. Strange. I suspect it is because there is nothing I can do about the laundry's twenty-six minutes, while the pot's three feel like something I could supervise. Waiting is hardest exactly where intervening still feels possible.

So I don't know how to wait well, and I have decided not to pretend otherwise. What I do now, on days that turn into waiting, is collect one small observation. How many times the phone came out today. What order things were set down in. How many minutes it took to arrive at eyes that could watch nothing.

Behind the glass the laundry keeps turning. In the last few minutes of the twenty-six, the faces in the laundromat tend to loosen into the same expression. People who waited for entirely different things, arriving at the same face. The contents of our waiting differ that much. The far end of it, sometimes, looks this much alike.