I’ll be honest, folks, I completely forgot about this week’s prompt. My family is going through a serious health crisis with a close family member and we have been out of town a lot, in the hospital, in waiting rooms, in each other’s company for as long as we can manage. I’ve spent a lot of time on the road and on my parents’ couch. And working on a writing prompt has been far from my mind.
But better late than never, right? So let’s get into it.
As a child I had a best friend whose family financially supported and often attended the community theater. There were three kids in the family, but the eldest son did not always go to the plays, and I was the grateful beneficiary of his busy schedule. Why let his ticket go to waste when their youngest’s best friend Erin could use it?
Any evening I was supposed to attend the Bay City Players with Tina’s family I would get dressed up in church-level clothes and sit in the living room starting a few minutes before they said they would pick me up. They lived just a few minutes away down Pine Road (the street I was walking on when this happened).
I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Until finally, ten or fifteen minutes after they said they’d pick me up, their Eighties-fabulous conversion van (the kind with the swiveling captain’s chairs and rope lights and curtains on the windows) pulled into the driveway. I’d rush outside, the door would slide open, and I would be met by either the sound of arguing or chilly silence.
This happened every time. Every time I took up my post in the living room where I could see out the front window early. Every time they got there late. Why did I keep getting ready early? Because that’s just who we were as a family. Why did they always get there late? I guess that’s just who they were as a family. (And probably, realistically, knowing all of the personalities involved…it was most likely my friend’s fault.)
Waiting is something we all have to do. We don’t all do it well.
We wait for rides, wait for diagnoses, wait for grades, wait for punishment, wait for recognition, wait for the previews to start, wait for the oven timer to ding, wait for the next season of the show we’re obsessed with, wait for someone to notice us.
What happens when the wait stretches out longer than we thought it would? What goes through our minds when we are waiting for a child to return home from an event they drove to? When we are waiting for a spouse to apologize for something we’re not sure they know hurt us? When we had a great job interview and then…crickets?
When we’re staring at our inboxes wondering when the next Experimental Wolves post is going to pop in there? ;)
Let’s talk about the story possibilities in that in-between time…
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