Jan 11 2009
Waiting for you
There is something I hate about love.
I hate the waiting.
For me, the undoubtedly proof that I am in love is only one: I start to wait.
I can tell you I have been in love in the past by the many times I have spent waiting for the men of my heart.
I have wasted a large portion of my pretty long marriage waiting for my ex husband. Waiting for him to come home, waiting for him to call me, waiting for him to take a decision, waiting for him to understand, waiting for him to pick me, waiting for him to tell me goodbye.
He did all of the above: he went back home, he did finally called me, he took the decision, he finally understood why he wanted, he picked me (at least the first time), he told me finally goodbye,.
Life while we wait is no life.
It’s a suspension of micro deaths that occur against our own will.
It’s a floating disaster waiting to happen or a looming horizon filled with imaginary battle fields bursting in flames.
Waiting is holding the breath and continue ad infinitum the silly lullaby that might calm the furious beast called “Not knowing”.
We try to soothe ourselves telling that everything is going to be ok, the man will come back, the voice will talk at the phone, the world as we know will not end.
Waiting is desperately looking for distractions to fill the sudden void, the gap between the promise that someone made and the absence of the action that only can release our heart from the torture of waiting.
Because waiting s a double headed monster.
In “Erwartung” (The waiting) by Schoenberg the woman waits in the wood the arrival of her lover. The drama is intense but waiting for a phone call in the safe of our home has the same intensity and level of anxiety.
Who waits doesn’t have the sense f proportions.
Waiting is like being under a spell, being bewitched….it leads to immobility. I don’t do anything until he arrives. Or calls or writes.
I prohibit myself to leave the room, the computer, the house for fear of missing him.
The person I am waiting possesses all the elements of a magical creature: he can appear at any minute, he can talk to me at any second, he can materialize his presence at any hour.
I am in love? Yes, because I am waiting. The other person never waits.
In his bestseller “Fragments d’un discourse amoreux” (Fragments of a love conversation) Roland Barthes talks about the characteristic of the amorous waiting.
He says “In this game of keeping themselves occupied and distracted who waits always loose: no matter what they do or think or what they read or listen to…they will always find themselves in the same position they were at the beginning: waiting”
There is a Chinese tale: a mandarin was in love with a courtesan. She then told him “I will be yours only when you will have spent one hundred nights seating on that tool, in my garden underneath my window”.
The mandarin sat and waited but at the end of the 99th night he got up and left.
He wasn’t in love.
So…what are you waiting for?
