The Wait

Half comatose, an old woman sits under the light brown glow of a single light blub. The blinds are drawn with no signs to television signals bouncing reflective images off of living room walls. Her head hangs low as if asleep or in some serious state of deep concentration, while turning herself into a gallery exhibit I occasionally observe on way home from work. Life has been lived, the only thing left to do is standy by until the time to die arrives. The doors are open, the windows unlatched as if she might be tempting death to arrive at a faster pace or a would be killer deranged enough to turn the woman into an evening news story. But after living in this neighborhood for the past year, no human or spirit has bothered to fulfill the wish. So each day the vigil continues slowly turning the old lady into a marble statue, awake yet frozen, withdrawing to a dreamland of past triumphs as well as failures, a personal movie theater with all the greatest hits of her generation, while over time the array of prescription drugs ingested sustain existence begin to warp the movies in a barrage paranoid delusional subplots where all the surroundings have become completely unfamiliar. No delivery into the safe haven of the afterlife, no the train is coming to a slow halt and the final stop, no different than the first one, so back on, stop after stop, auto repeat, flat land two dimensional imagery which is neither inhabitable or any sort of refuge, only a luxurious facade hiding an impentrable truth of eroding on a time line that offers no joy or pain, merely a hollow, untextured exoskeleton that stares back in the bathroom mirror. Back to the chair once more with head held low, exhuasted, frustrated, and ultimately praying the entropy of her physical presence collapses one final time.