The color of waiting is white. It shows no pity to those who succumb and it wraps itself around you saying: “Now you are mine for awhile.” It fills your head with its dense cotton batting and settles in your abdomen where its presence makes itself known with an ever-growing sense of anxiety.
Waiting is a white cotton sheet tacked over the window, sequestering you in your home and holding you hostage to its demands. It sits, wedged next to you in your chair, radiating its alabaster coldness while erasing the words in your book. It whispers, “You are not important” and makes you forget your name. White noise clogs your ears and makes time stand still. Minutes will seem like hours and days will feel like centuries. It etches wrinkles in your face and changes the part in your hair. It is the grayness of nothingness and of everything.
The color of waiting is a ghostly white specter floating above your head and through your body. Its tendrils weave a web across your eyes until you can only focus inward, where it sits patiently, always present, always reminding you of who’s really in charge. It creeps into your bed at night and startles you awake – an icy cold finger rearranging a jumbled dreamscape into its own name. Its white-hot ember will light up the blackness and you will not sleep again tonight.
Instead, you will wait.
You will wait and you will think only of waiting and you won’t stop, won’t stop, won’t stop, while your eyes film over with milky white cataracts and your nose fills with the acrid smell of self-loathing and your mouth tastes only regret.
“You will wait now” it whispers, its departure time unknown.
Observant Bystander 