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Still, I keep waiting. Today I wait for the heat to pass. It’s 100 degrees at 10am and without air conditioning, there’s nothing else to do but wait. Wait for the weather to cool, for the night to come, for the breeze that will blow through our house, for the quiet of the weekend, for books to arrive, for Thanksgiving when I can see my family again, for the distant future in which my friends return to LA and we go out to dinner again, for when we can embrace and hold each other, for an easing of this pressure.

When writing about waiting, one waiting opens up into another. My waitings becomes a series of doors that with the slightest push swing open, so that the hallway in which I find myself continually gets longer and longer. Or maybe my waiting might be better described in sound, these waitings forming a wind chime and my writing the slightest wind. In waiting, each imaginary and unfulfilled desire is linked to another—and to memory as much as the present. In writing about waiting, a network forms. There’s only more waiting and more ways to speak of it. And from this web of waiting I speak to you.

The Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec writes, “I was always drawn to waiting, which sometimes I get the feeling is the only thing I’ve ever really done.”[1] If waiting is the only thing we ever do, then let’s wait together. Come wait with me in the unfinished crumbling and building and crumbling again. Let’s keep naming our waiting something else, like writing or reading or listening, and if those don’t seem right, let’s try again, and name our waiting walking with you to get dinner, or reaching out to each other, or speaking to each other, as we keep doing, being witness to each other’s lives.

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[1] Sergio Chejfec, Notes Towards a Pamphlet trans. Whitney DeVos, (New York: Ugly Duckling Press, 2020), 2.