Waiting room

A room.
I often find myself in things like rooms.

Rat-run mazes of brick and mortar that deaden traffic’s hiss and seem to grip to the earth like a terrified fist, raging against time, raging against the eventual rubble that it will one day become. A concrete burden of brutalist architecture, so unapologetically hewn from simplicity that its own existence seems to be disinterested.

Home is within a box of several adjoining squares that knit and weave into singular. We fill them with memories, things that hold memories, we fill them with cheap electronic nonsense that flickers and buzzes away in many ways that the manufactures couldn’t have intended. And too, we work in rooms: an office, pale in lifelessness, filled with the merry click of excel spreadsheets pinging and correlating with conflicting data; pushing onward to some united goal of better.
It’s not a room that itself exists in singular but instead a place of purpose facilitating a need.

But this was not where I found myself.

Many places have names–towns, cities, park benches–and of course many rooms just lend themselves to a name.

So it was that this was a waiting room.

A name does not wholly dictate a purpose and so long as intention is clear–with a sign or what-have-you–it’s obvious what a person should do, in a room. They have things, there are things in a room; If left without objects, even in their intentional absence, surely that room will still exist as spare.
But this, the place where I first began to let my mind wonder and the place where I still sit, was not a spare-room; this, by design, was a room for waiting: silent, omnipresent, joy devouring, waiting. And of its purpose, intention was greatly facilitated within itself.

A bench seat, one covered by the ever-sheened brown linoleum, so often seen to clasp itself around decades old furniture in rooms like this that aren’t meant to be enjoyed. Unstainable, it exists outside the realm of wear and seems able to withstand any alchemical barrage of cleaning products that may be sloshed onto its surface nightly…hopefully nightly.
The bench was hard, possibly harder than granite.
As if to rebel against its very name, the cushioning chose to exist in a state of emulating the plastic frame underneath: a frame so curisouly angled that no living human could align their posture to its obstinate orientation.

Looking over my shoulder I glanced a long forgotten corner of this bench, a place that sunlight had dared not to tread lest it be consumed by dust and dead moths. Here, the frame’s plastic was white, the whole frame may have been white once. It has probably existed in a wide variety of gradually shifting hues, long before it finally settled on this current colour I now kicked my shoe against–one so very close to a sun-bleached bone.
It seemed as if the plastic had intentionally settled on resembling a shade of coffee that no person of sound mind would care to finish–not a coffee expensive enough to take back with complaint but one just abhorrent enough to incite a crinkled feeling of yeah, maybe not.

I lowered my eyes.
Carpet, garnered in tight fists of coiled, unvacuumed, greyness melted outward and created a sea of banality. Lifting my foot I noticed this carpet had that particular acrylic crunch whenever pressure was applied to it and from judging the numerous droplets of tea and coffee that were flecked across the carpet’s surface it’s ability to repel any moisture was sutiably submarine grade.
Colour recoiled from this room in withered clutch, as even the green of the emergency light had long faded into a sanguine pall of lime that was draped over a lifeless fluorescent light globe inside.

The silent vacuum of this waiting room is amplified by the echoing movements of a clock that measured seconds with minutes and gave no quater to bold arrows of time or other idle thoughts of poety.
I waited, the clock did not.
It worked, existing in its purpose and remaining as it always had.
It is possible that to this clock the room, in which we now share our current existence, was not a waiting room at all.
It is possible that perspective shapes this world much more curiously than we may realise.

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J.McCray
2020