Waiting

I had a lot of time as a child. I grew up in time passing slowly. During the summers out of school, at my grandparents’ house in Rimini, I lived in a lot of waiting: for something to happen, to arrive, to leave, to decide, to take me. There was so much of it, that most of my day happened in the soft and supportive space of the meantime, in between this or that. In the summer, between twelve and three, we had to wait when the sun was too hot to go out. At the beach, from five to seven when the water was too cold, grandpa had to talk to somebody, or we had to digest before swimming. After nine pm, I waited for endless hours before I was tired and asleep. For as much as I knew, I was young as long as I waited.

Those long summer hours of waiting, drifting into one another, sometimes with a rhythmic precision, were full of time to live. When we stayed at home in the morning, the three hours after lunch were so especially empty that they led to rebellion. In the hot living room, still shaded with curtains, my sisters and I pretended to follow the afternoon show until grandpa fell asleep on his chair. Soon after, upon a nod, we sprang to action changing channels carefully on the TV next to him. My sisters and I pushed for noise: Starsky and Hutch, Charlie's Angels, or the anime. The entertainment soon started. Babes dueling in yellow and blue uniforms, dramatic watery eyes, ruffling dust from screeching cars, young athletic women and a chubby man on the phone with a distant voice. All of this until his snoring was over, on that one channel.  

If we went to the beach in the morning, at noon I waited for three o’clock to come. In the company of my liquorice stick lemon ice cream, I paused under the umbrella staring at the family next to me. A father reading the newspaper with a straw Panama hat smelled of bronzing coconut oil, while two girls played alone in the shade of the umbrella. A pair of blue plastic slippers with white stripes were parked under his chair, below the family clothes, hanging soulless from the rail of the umbrella, catching the hot humid breeze. 

When I became a teenager, waiting became “wasting my time,” as my parents called it. By then I had developed a natural inclination for laying my corporeal dough on the featherly bed of an empty afternoon. I treasured the multiple dimensions of doing nothing in particular, listening to the hours passing while the others were out. I spent many afternoons during high school at one of my friends’ houses, without homework to tether me, delaying the plans of growing up that life had for me. But even that was never a waste as I saw it. I had friends because I had time to spend with them. Most afternoons, I would meet my friend Elisa after school, where two other friends soon joined us. I would open my drawing book and doodle with a pen until dinner time, while discussing the pressing matter of the world: the nuclear threat, the exotic cowboy look of Ronald Regan, and the Depeche Mode. My teenage life became populated in the vacuum of time, as precise as an equation. In my constant state of vagueness, I encountered my creativity and nourished intuitive ideas.

By the end of high school, I had a lot of training in the art of doing nothing in particular. When I was almost 18, my grandpa was dying. Grandma called the ambulance on her very sick man, delaying his departure for two more painful years, the last of which was spent in a crowded dormitory for patients in a vegetative state. I waited long hours by his bed, in a very silent room full of others. I stared at the ceiling or looked around in circles, like I was doing yoga with my thoughts. After a while, I was able to take off from that bed, smelling of bleach and cleaning supplies, and enter inside of myself, like a wise older person. 

Unnoticed, I drew on the margin of a magazine. The number three is the base of reality, the number two opens a dynamic on the middle ground, the one is the perfect. Three and two are multiple of unit one, which is always there. I thought I could finally trace the secret dynamic of the universe. But I would have to wait one or two decades more to touch the depth of that fourth dimension, until I became a mother. I had to wait for my child to grow, inch by inch. With him, when he was just a hopeless bundle, my experience of time and space first accelerated, then compressed, and finally exploded. Waiting was about to become something bigger than I thought it was. Beyond my skills to escape between the cracks of some solid facts, after I trained living in the meantime, I discovered the entrance to an alternative reality hiding in plain sight.

At home in Milano, the first night I took our first born son home was an initiation. My husband went to bed late; he tried to keep me company as much as he could, but when he just couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer, he collapsed in bed. I understood that. I wish I could have done it. Instead, I found myself alone, a situation, hidden beyond the celebrations and excitement, that I had not expected when I took my son from the hospital. The house felt totally silent, enough to feel the emptiness of the rest of the city. I stood waiting. I felt as if only I were left out of the normal order of things. My arms moved left and right to put him to sleep. He would go to sleep before me. I couldn’t say I was “busy,” as for any other usual activity. I wasn’t moving much. But in the three feet of my space, I was doing a lot, moment by moment, while waiting for him to fall asleep. My son and I moved to an invisible new floor inside the same living room or kitchen, next to where the others appeared to live. All of my doing made sense to us inside that different time and space, even if it didn’t appear to be much to others. Swinging my arms, holding him, walking around, putting him down, waiting some more, collapsing in my bed, and waking up again. More than doing, I was rotating around. That was my new circular motion generated by my body latching to his. And there was a lot of waiting in there, until sunrise, while hoping for myself to be in bed and rest. 

Since that day of our dual initiation, when we recognized each other as mother and son, my life has never been mine alone. I have become like one of those figures in the old paintings, with small creatures attached and around my body. When I was a child, I thought that my time was mine. That initial continuum that I thought was natural, was instead given by somebody else who waited for me, outside doors, at school, in the kitchen, downstairs, or in the car. I thought I was waiting for them, while young, but I had to discover that they had also been waiting for me, guarding and securing the time of my existence. As for them, for me now, inside my new circular shape, other people are living, with their own time, their own body. Like it is told in biology class, I am a living organism that has multiplied, generating other time and space within me. Waiting has, literally, come around, and it had disclosed its secret to me: that one can always fly around when confined in a small space, that there is much to enjoy in the richness of an empty hour, and, especially, that it is possible to accept a fact as a fact but not as a limit. 

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